In the last five years, the Arab-American Association of New York, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December, has quintupled its budget to a half-million dollars, drawn from individual donations and foundation support from the likes of the New York Foundation, the Union Square Awards, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation. It is the front line of American acculturation, if not integration, for tens of thousands of ESL-hungry Arab immigrants from Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, and beyond. The organization plays more or less the role that Abraham Cahan’s Forward played for the immigrants of Eastern Europe a century ago.

The executive director of the organization is Linda Sarsour, 31, a Palestinian-American mother of three who wears the hijab and plans to become the first Arab-American on the New York City Council when she runs in 2017, after the local seat opens up. Sarsour, who took over the organization in 2005 and has raised its profile tremendously—she was honored in December as one of 10 Champions of Change by the White House—travels a lot on behalf of the association. The young woman who runs the association day to day, juggling budget memos, the census, and calls from the BBC is all of 24 years old. Her name is Jennie Goldstein, and she is a Jew from the Upper West Side.

“Everything without precedent, or controversial—it lands on my desk,” Goldstein explained when we met. “When Linda’s out, I’m the last answer. I make it rain.”

***

Goldstein has blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, a startling sight among the hijabs worn by the other female staffers. The organization occupies what was once an obstetrician’s office, which explains the waiting area out front and its maze of small, fluorescent-lit rooms. Goldstein’s office is festooned with a poster of a Palestinian hip-hop band and a sign from a protest of the NYPD earlier this month. (“#wtfnypd,” she scrawled on it in Magic Marker as I stood there.)

Goldstein joined the Arab-American Association in 2009 through AmeriCorps after graduating from Middlebury, where she studied international economics. “When I was offered the position, I thought, ‘hell yes,’ ” she told me. “I had seen the posting on the Middlebury career services site, and I just knew that it was my job. I didn’t speak Arabic, but I could wrangle large groups of people. I didn’t come here because I’m a rabble-rousing activist. My interest was in community building. In college, I had to persuade you to come see the band. Here, people are bursting through the door asking for services. It was a real mandate. But it’s been scary to build services you’re not a part of.”

Goldstein’s father is Jewish and her mother is Protestant. Growing up on the Upper West Side, she lit candles for Shabbat on Fridays; she went to church with her mother on Sundays. Being raised by parents of different faiths never confused her because she was never asked to keep anything straight. She accompanied her mother on Sundays because she liked being with her, and she memorized the Lord’s Prayer as a 6-year-old because it “was part of the vernacular of educated people that I wanted to know.”

But she was given enough to go on: The family split what she called “the three major Jewish holidays”—Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Thanksgiving, she explained with a laugh—between her father’s brothers. On Yom Kippur, Goldstein would fast with her best friend, who was also half-Jewish. “School was closed, so we’d go to Macy’s and try on clothes because we felt skinny because we were fasting,” she said. “And then we’d go to a Jewish deli on the Upper West Side and eat dinner.” Her mother was usually the one who harassed her father to light candles on Friday night. “For my mother, the point of religious tradition is tradition. That’s more important than which exact code of ethics it is. As a kid, I saw the church as a community center.”

Continue reading: Smoking shisha in Queens

While other precincts of New York City take on a tranquil, almost ghost-green glow on Christmas, Borough Park, the Hasidic enclave, teems with commerce and activity on this holy day. Its main drag, 13th Avenue, has the feel of an Asian city: Shanghai or Hong Kong minus the rickshaws and the pedicabs. Cars and pedestrians compete for room and air in narrow straits, and the street has the ambience of an urban bazaar, with chains and banks nestled next to mom-and-pop stores selling clothing, housewares, and just about everything else. The primary objective on our annual shopping trips was to buy a hat for my father, but the outing came with a number of blandishments and outright gifts for me: usually an article or two of clothing, and a post-shopping meal in a neighborhood restaurant.

My father is gimp-legged after he was hit by a car 30 years ago, but he lives a surprisingly nomadic existence in the greater New York area, often reaching all of the city’s five boroughs and many of its suburbs in a single day of rabbinical work. He drives a sporty, silver, late-model Cadillac, and frequently, at day’s end and too far afield to eat at home, he winds up in a kosher restaurant. One might think him to be a kosher-restaurant connoisseur, but he tends not to pay them any mind. In fact, my father’s dining preferences range from deli to dairy, and not much beyond that. My earliest memories of eating with him were in his haunts on the Lower East Side—Sam’s 999 on Essex Street, where he’d order pastrami and a Heineken, and Steinberg’s upstairs dairy restaurant, where he’d have smoked whitefish, coffee, and cheesecake for dessert.

On Christmas Day four years ago, after we had chosen the hat, we then had to choose a restaurant. Did we want milchig or fleishig, dairy or meat? We chose an upscale dairy restaurant. The restaurant was packed with late lunchers like us. There were mothers with strollers and finger-fed babies. Toddlers ate baked ziti, indolent children ate white rolls with butter, and businessmen nattered on at corner tables over lox and sable. My father and I stood for 20 minutes until a table opened near the swinging-door entrance to the kitchen. Then we sat there for another 20 minutes until service arrived. The waiter, who looked like an apparatchik for Josef Stalin, took our order.

My father took out his reading glasses to study the menu, even though he knew what he wanted. “Smoked whitefish,” he told the waiter.

“What else?” the waiter asked.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?” the waiter said, incredulously.

“You have decaf?” my father asked.

“No. No decaf,” said the waiter.

“Mushroom barley soup?”

“No. Split pea only.”

“Potato salad?”

“No.”

“Tuna salad?”  I asked.

“We’re out.”

“Egg salad?”

“Blintzes only, with sour cream,” he said. “I have to get to other tables. Make up your mind.”

“OK,” I finally said. “Split pea soup and a vegetable omelet. Can you bring my father a seltzer?”

“No seltzer,” the waiter said.

A restaurant with no seltzer? I began to consider the idea that our waiter had traces of sadism. He was short and stout and had the air of someone who had been humiliated often, probably in a faraway land. I thought of him as one of those nondescript soldiers you see in newsreels from a forgotten conflict, like the Russo-Finnish war, perhaps a private in charge of the horses or the latrine. And to deprive my father of seltzer, if indeed he were doing so, was cruel. My father’s love for seltzer cannot be understood in purely physical or even gastronomic terms. It is simply part of him, long fetishized by his digestive track. Still, what was there to do?

We sat for another 20 minutes waiting for our food. It wasn’t a big deal: The restaurant was busy. My father and I passed the time in small talk. We made calculations on our napkins, refinancing our mortgage payments and family budgets. When our portions arrived, we ate silently and, in my father’s case, industriously—storing up glucose for whatever intellectual, physical, and monetary challenges lay ahead.

Then it was time for dessert. It would be cheesecake. Because we were sitting near the kitchen, I had a glimpse of a platter of store-bought cheesecake slices. There were regular, marbled chocolate, and blueberry cheesecakes. While I was in the restroom, my father ordered plain cheesecake. Upon my return, I urged him to reconsider, telling him the marbled chocolate cheesecake was much better, and he agreed. I called to the waiter. “My father changed his mind,” I said. “Instead of the New York plain cheesecake, he wants the marble chocolate cheesecake.” The waiter looked at us in disgust and said, “Once I put in the order, I cannot change it.”

He then spun away and returned shortly with a plate of the plain cheesecake. My father, who had spent his childhood in the Bronx, knew how to be grateful for food and to those who made it. His grandmother kept a carp in the bathtub to make gefilte fish for the Sabbath, and live turkeys occasionally appeared in their apartment to be slaughtered. But here, my father was surprised and annoyed that he was not permitted to have what he wanted for such a niggling and inadequate reason. Never one to make waves, though, he picked up the fork and ate the cheesecake like a boy fearful of offending his mother. “It was good cheesecake,” he said. “But not as good as the marble cheesecake would have been.”

The waiter brought the check, and my father again put on his reading glasses to study it. He took out his credit card. “Are you going to tip this monster?” I asked him. “Well,” my father said sheepishly, “not that he deserves any, but something I suppose.” I said that I wouldn’t tip him at all. My father considered this for a moment and then shook his head slowly. “Ich kenne nichts,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t do it. I can’t take away his parnassah,” his livelihood.

Centuries of pious passivity had become the gravity that kept my father connected to his loved ones and to his work. His attachments were carefully sewn and cherished, sometimes overly so. To ask my father to withhold the tip was in effect to ask him to depart from a worldview that had kept him going for years. My father’s father was an immigrant house-painter who was both sustained and oppressed by slum lords, painting closets and hanging wallpaper for $20 a room. The fact that my father had ascended the economic ladder enough to drive a Cadillac would only intensify and amplify an indictment of his soul should he withhold the pay of a working man to teach him a lesson about courtesy and civility.

“But Dad,” I said. “This man mistreated us. He was abusive.”

“What should I tell you?” he said with the air of a man who had been asked to do something soul-damaging, like slaughter a calf or put a horse to sleep. “You’re right, but I can’t do it.”

In the face of mistreatment, my father could do nothing, as his father before him could do nothing when his clients decided cavalierly to pay him less than the agreed-upon fee. And standing there in front of my father, with a 150-year potpourri of Jewish piety and passivity—and of honor and dignity—between us, I too could do nothing but, in effect, turn the other cheek on Christmas Day.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in rural Connecticut until the age of 10, when his family moved to Los Angeles, Shulman maintained his connection to nature while simultaneously documenting a new urban paradigm that was taking shape on the West Coast. Shulman sought spiritual sanctity in the beauty of the physical world—both built and natural—but never in a synagogue. He had no interest in ethno-centrism or Jewish exceptionalism. Yet he maintained close relationships with architects in the progressive modern movement, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe who often found philosophical and professional support from Jewish Americans.

Architects of American synagogues embraced the seismic shift of modernism, and so too did practitioners and patrons of residential and commercial modern design. This generally meant rejecting historical precedent in favor of a forward-thinking visual and spatial vocabulary that valued clean lines and new technologies over fussy ornamentation. When it came time to design a home and studio for himself on a bucolic Hollywood hillside, where Shulman bought a plot in 1947, he hired his friend Raphael Soriano, a Sephardic Jew who immigrated from Rhodes, Greece, to Los Angeles. The project was completed in 1950, and Shulman lived and worked at the property until his death at home on July 15, 2009, at the age of 98.

Although Shulman traveled with his camera and took photographs abroad, two recent books about him reveal new insights into his relationship with his adopted hometown. This spring’s Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis—which features text by architectural writer Sam Lubell and a forward by Shulman’s daughter Judy McKee—shows how Shulman recorded all corners of L.A. as it went through various boom cycles and forged a new path for cities in the West. Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles draws from a 2007-2008 exhibition of Shulman’s work at Los Angeles Central Library that featured a range of buildings and environments. And Shulman’s legacy is again manifest in several exhibitions associated with the Getty-coordinated citywide series of exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, which continues through April 2012.

For the accompanying slideshow, author Lubell selected images representative of Shulman’s life and work. His commentary is provided in the captions.

They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.

The driver, the article states, did not intervene. The World explains further:

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

According to the New York Post, “Signs written in Hebrew and English direct women to use the back door during busy times.”

What remains to be determined, and likely will be—the Department of Transportation has launched an investigation—is whether a private bus company that provides a public service (and pays the city to do so) largely serving a religious community is exempt from anti-discrimination laws.

Women ride in back on sex-segregated Brooklyn bus line [New York World]
‘Back of bus’ furor [NYP]

I should note that there are plenty of valid reasons for Sadat X to call me a dick. I’m 24, and I just moved into a loft in Brooklyn. I went to this weird Orthodox yeshiva high school based on Kohlbergian moral development, and I write under my full name because of that other guy, who is probably the world’s greatest living writer. My main hobbies are watching YouTube videos of R. Kelly, owning records, reading Pynchon, and wearing plaid. I spend too much time on Twitter following sarcastic assholes (like musicians), interesting assholes (like reporters), music venues (for upcoming shows), and the TV goddess Alison Brie. (I will never apologize for my love of Alison Brie.) I also like following people who are genuinely dedicated to their craft, which was probably what I was thinking when I decided to follow Sadat X. He can be a funny, charming dude, as his wine reviews make clear.

Sadat X was apparently having a bad weekend. He had seen two guys kiss, which brought on a rant about how unnatural gay men are, and then started retweeting messages claiming “it’s no coincidence that the rise of homosexual ‘rights’ coincides with an increasing level of Jewish control,” and how the majority of slaveholders in America have been Jewish. I ignored the proverb by Jay-Z, from the Book of “Takeover”: “A wise man told me not to argue with fools,/ ’cause from a distance you can’t tell who is who.” I tweeted at Sadat X a link to Cornel West talking about Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, you have to start somewhere, right? A small back-and-forth, and then the dick-eating. Specifically: “EAD!” I was a little bummed I only merited an acronym, but he was having a busy night, what with legions of gay and sundry other hip-hop fans saying how insulted they were.

Of course, if the full extent of anti-Semitism in rap was has-been dudes telling me to perform various anatomically (and digestively) impossible tasks, that’d be fine. But nothing Sadat X said, on Twitter or elsewhere, has the power of when, say, Professor Griff of Public Enemy was citing Henry Ford’s The International Jew, or when Ice Cube moaned that MC Ren “let a Jew break up my crew” in reference to N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller and his entanglement with the Jewish Defense League. Those were moments that stopped me midway through songs, killed all the energy of the music. This was more of a head-shaker. Outside of hardcore hip-hop fans, no one’s really going to care about one rapper’s questionable comments on Twitter about the Jewish people.

Luckily enough, we’ve also got Kanye West.

There’s no real point in re-hashing every controversy the illustrious Mr. West has been a part of. But if you haven’t heard of him—ego! He’s got a big ego, that’s pretty much what it all comes down to. And he’s very talented. So talented that he made an album with Jay-Z called Watch the Throne. And such an ego that when he compared his own track to the Holocaust on said album, no one batted an eye.

Tellingly, the other German reference on Watch the Throne, concerning “Other Other Benz,” got more of the hype. But there it is, leading off the dubstep-influenced “Who Gon Stop Me,” just after the bass kicks in: “This is something like the Holocaust/ Millions of our people lost … Now who gon stop me.” It hangs above the chorus like the shiniest of jewels. Like so much of Watch the Throne, this reference to the Holocaust only exists because it can, a rarefied word that can be plucked from only the tallest tree in the greenest forest, which coincidentally only Kanye and Jay-Z can afford. Even though the Third Reich has apparently been on “Ye’s mind a lot lately,” no one really knows—or feels the need to explain—exactly what the offending “this” is, leaving the listener to guess at which of Kanye’s many interests are being referred to here: the awesomeness of his own beats, the awesomeness of Watch the Throne in general, or the plight of African-Americans.

There’s no point in comparing Sadat X and Kanye’s comments directly. Hate-filled rantings and dumb lyrics are very different things. But when taken together, it’s difficult not to see a common thread—a refusal to acknowledge the Jewish experience. Kanye’s chorus reminds me of when Susan Boyle covered Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—a re-appropriation of a Jewish experience for no other reason than it being handy. Boyle takes an experience deeply entrenched in the Old Testament and thinks by getting the technicalities right she’s entitled to make it her own. If you pause and look around enough, it’s the type of thing you see all the time, especially if you grew up Jewish in America. Saying this country is rooted in “Judeo-Christian traditions”—ignoring the fact that it wasn’t 50 years ago when houses in this country had leases preventing us from living there—Kanye’s not there, not by a long shot, but “Who Gon Stop Me” gives him the keys to this grand American tradition. I say we push back. To appreciate the Jewish experience as ongoing, to look at Jewish artists and Jewish culture with renewed vigor. And, when need be, angrily proclaim our place in history.

And that’s not to say that no artist should ever touch the Holocaust. They should! (Well, maybe Sadat X shouldn’t.) It’s an event that didn’t only affect Jews, and some of the best works related to it, like Paragraph 175, a documentary on the Nazi persecution of gays, discuss that very fact. But if you want to talk about it, talk about it. Back on Brand Nubian’s first album, when Sadat X was still Derek X, he put it pretty well on “Concerto in X Minor”: “Now, the civilized man’s main goal is to teach/ And I try to achieve this with verbal outreach.”

But Tuesday night, voters decisively handed the seat to Bob Turner, an Irish Catholic Republican, by a margin of 54-46. At 71, Turner is a retired cable-television executive previously most famous for creating The Jerry Springer Show. His previous political experience was to serve as the GOP’s sacrificial lamb against Weiner in 2010. But Turner defeated the Jewish Democrat because voters believed he was the pro-Israel candidate.

Yes, yes, there were other issues. Though Weprin keeps kosher, attends synagogue daily, and boasts of his countless relatives who live in the Jewish State, he had voted in favor of same-sex marriage, which didn’t sit well among Orthodox Jewish voters. That same constituency might have forgiven support of gay marriage from a more secular Jew like Weiner, but they couldn’t abide someone who they perceived as selling out the faith. The barrage of robocalls to voters from various Orthodox leaders on the matter couldn’t have helped. Nor did endorsements of Turner mixed into Talmud-study groups. Of course, the continuing economic malaise and high unemployment made matters worse. And Weprin wasn’t a strong campaigner. But the issue on voters’ minds was Israel.

**

Ben’s Best Kosher Deli in Rego Park is located on an otherwise typical Queens Boulevard strip of Bukharian Jewish restaurants and pornography stores. The customers I spoke to at the Queens landmark during lunchtime on Election Day had all voted for Anthony Weiner in the past, but this election was different, they explained over corned beef, kreplach, and kishka. Fran Alper, an older woman eating lunch with her husband, told me she was voting for Turner “because Obama is against Israel.” Another geriatric Jewish couple, Carol and Larry Samuels, were even more savagely against Obama’s Israel policy. They were appalled not just that the president wants to return Israel to its 1967 borders, they said, but that the president “refused to take a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu.” (The first part is not quite true—Obama said this summer that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians should be based upon the 1967 borders, with land swaps—and the second part refers to Netanyahu’s Washington visit in March 2010, which did not include the traditional joint photo op.) Carol said she wanted to physically shake fellow Jews who still voted for Democrats—even as she admitted that she’d previously voted for Weiner and Spitzer.

Up until the last minute, the Weprin campaign tried to win over such voters. At a senior center in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills at noon on Election Day, State Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, campaigning for the Democrat, offered the weak line that if they wanted to send Obama a message on Israel, they should call the White House. Andrew Hevesi, a Democratic Assemblyman from Queens, tried to turn the elderly crowd against Turner by describing him as a “scary, scary man.” He, along with a full array of Jewish elected officials from the borough, claimed Turner wanted to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and abolish the Department of Education. This parade of horribles culminated when Weprin himself claimed that Turner even wanted to abolish the Department of Agriculture. Never mind that there are no farms, let alone forests, in Forest Hills.

Still, this approach proved effective among senior citizens I spoke to who fondly remembered FDR and relied on their Social Security checks. Others who weren’t motivated by fear of Turner’s “radical Republicanism,” in the words of one voter, explained that they were faithful Democrats who wanted to support the party despite a lackluster candidate. One loyal voter in Forest Hills bragged about voting for Adlai Stevenson from Korea in 1952 and told the volunteer at his door that “he wasn’t voting for Weprin, he was voting for the Democrats.”

**

The question, of course, is what this Republican victory portends for the president in 2012. The Obama camp was quick to dismiss the results of the special election as, well, special. In a statement, Rep. Steve Israel, the Long Islander who serves as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, noted that “special elections are always difficult—they are low turnout, high intensity races” and said he was confident that “the results in NY-09 are not reflective of what will happen in November 2012.”

Others see Turner’s victory as the beginning of the end of the New Deal Coalition: the marriage between Jews and the Democratic Party consummated by Roosevelt 80 years ago. Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf believes Weprin’s defeat signals a major realignment of the Jewish vote. There’s a “new Jewish vote that is observant and communally based,” Sheinkopf told me Monday. Secular liberal Jews are intermarrying and thus, he argues, losing their connection with Israel. Those that remain in the community are more observant and behave politically more like Catholics, Democratic-leaning swing voters, than reliable Democrats as Jews traditionally have been.

Prominent Turner endorser and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch wasn’t looking for a realignment of the Jewish vote, just the opportunity for Jews to make a statement that the “Democratic Party and President Obama [shouldn’t] take Jews for granted.” No single person determined this election more than Koch, who prominently endorsed Turner in July and then served as a crucial surrogate among seniors to refute Democratic charges that Turner wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. Koch thought a Weprin defeat would force Obama to reassess his views and policies toward Israel.

“The president thinks that Jews just were compensated with Israel to make up for the Holocaust, and Obama doesn’t appreciate that it’s the historic home of the Jewish people going back to Abraham,” Koch told me. But more than appreciating Israel’s historical importance, to Koch, the obstacle to peace is the Palestinian Authority. If Hamas and Fatah don’t want to negotiate, Israel shouldn’t have to negotiate with them. All Obama needs to do is recognize this fact and Koch would return to the Democratic fold, he said.

Unlike Koch, Turner does not seem to have given much thought to U.S. policy in the Middle East. When I interviewed him Tuesday at his campaign headquarters, the Republican thought that the message Jewish voters were sending was merely that Obama should be friendlier toward Israel. Turner fumbled when I asked about specific policy measures that the administration should take to show this friendliness. Finally, he settled on moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an issue that Koch dismissed as “not a big deal.” Yet, Turner continued to play up Israel as an issue on election night, putting an Israeli flag along with the American flag on stage at his campaign event. But it was clear that his advocacy for the Jewish State was not a political opportunity that he found, but a political opportunity that found him.

David Weprin was not a good candidate. He’s a nebbish-ey mustachioed man with a limp handshake and what appears to be a toupee. After his nonconcession speech last night at a bar in Queens, crowded less because of the press of supporters than because of its cramped size, he was quickly hustled out, lest he have to interact with the media, let alone supporters.

But his failings as a retail politician weren’t what did him in. When the Orthodox Jew loses an election because he can’t attract the pro-Israel vote, something else is going on. It may be a vast shift, or more likely the type of quirk that puts the special in special elections. Either way, for the next year, the Zionist congressman from the Jewish district in Queens will be a devout Catholic from the Rockaways.

CORRECTION, Sept. 20: This article originally dismissed the allegation that Obama refused to take a photo with Netanyahu as “an urban legend with about the same veracity as allegations of the president’s Kenyan citizenship.” While the two men have been photographed together on several occasions, at least one visit by Netanyahu to Washington pointedly did not include any joint photo opportunities. This error has been corrected.

Now she has written a second memoir, The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, that offers a loving and often devastating portrait of her mother and all that she sacrificed to keep her family intact, both in Egypt and in the United States. It also delves into Lagnado’s own painful experiences growing up, first as the daughter of protective Egyptian parents trying to find her way in 1960s America, then as a critically ill teenager (she was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma at 16 and spent the better part of a year undergoing radiation treatments), and, finally, as a young journalist making her way in the world.

Lagnado spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about the high price of American assimilation, the difficulties of writing this book, and the ties that have bonded mothers and daughters in her family together across generations. [Running time: 25:16.]

I could rebut most of the commenters’ objections to my David Brooks-inspired list of what is haimish and what is not. (Oh, and for the record, it was inspired not only by Lenny Bruce’s routine but also by Norman Mailer’s essay on hip.) However, “artcohn” has my number, writing, “Neither the Upper West Side, nor the Upper East Side of Manhattan are haimish. Bensonhurst and Flatbush in Brooklyn, and Kew Gardens Hills and Rego Park in Queens are haimish.”

He is completely right. This was horribly myopic of me. I apologize. (Seriously.) “artcohn” gets a copy of Sherwin B. Nuland’s Maimonides biography, because he is wise; and I get one, too, that it may teach me wisdom and humility.

Notes on Haimish
Maimonides

Sentencing Lebovits to the maximum term of up to 32 years in jail, DiMango told the courtroom that both the victim, who was a recovering drug addict, and Lebovits, who had been abused as a boy, epitomized “the ultimate harm and havoc” of sexual abuse. At the time, Lebovits was one of a string of men who had been hauled before a judge on what seemed like an almost monthly basis to face charges of sexually abusing boys. By last spring, the Brooklyn District Attorney had indicted and prosecuted almost 30 men over a period of about 18 months, many of them teachers and rabbis, in what was perceived to be a crackdown on abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world.

Then, this April, without warning, Baruch Lebovits walked out of jail.

Lebovits was free on $250,000 bail following the arrest of a rabbi, Samuel Kellner, on charges of bribery and witness tampering. Kellner was charged with giving a boy—not the boy who addressed the court, but another alleged victim—$10,000 to falsely testify he had been abused by Lebovits and of threatening to bring more victims forward unless the Lebovits family paid him $400,000. Today, the matter is still unresolved.

Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes told a press conference that he remained confident the victim whose testimony secured Lebovits’ conviction—the young man who had addressed the court—was telling the truth and that Lebovits would return to jail. But, regardless of the outcome, the episode represented a major setback for Jewish victims of abuse.

For the past few years, survivors’ advocates have been chipping away at the communal wall of silence that has surrounded abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world and at the various halakhic justifications that have been given for dealing with the issue internally through Jewish courts, known as beit dins. The allegations that now complicate the Lebovits case epitomize some of the worst fears within the community: that the so-called victims are liars, that the secular authorities do not always get the right man, and that, without rabbis as a firewall, innocent people can be publicly shamed and put in prison.

There is little doubt, even among leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, that sexual abuse of children is a serious problem. As more victims and their families have come forward in recent years, reports of abuse have proliferated. Dov Hikind, a state assembly member whose district includes Borough Park, claims to have gathered material on hundreds of such cases, largely from personal testimony.

The more pressing issue is how to solve that problem. Victims’ advocates and law-enforcement officials continue to urge survivors to report cases to social services or the police. But some leading rabbis in ultra-Orthodox communities like Borough Park continue to insist that adults who suspect abuse must consult a rabbi before reporting it to the authorities. Earlier this month, Agudath Israel of America, the top Orthodox rabbinic authority in the country, released a statement instructing its followers that only a rabbi can decide whether there is enough suspicion in each case to override the Jewish law of mesirah, which prevents Jews from reporting each other to the secular authorities.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, Yeshiva University’s spiritual adviser and a prominent advocate on behalf of survivors, said Lebovits’ harsh sentence followed by the allegations of witness-tampering and bribery would only make a mistrustful community even more suspicious. “We are dealing with an element within the Orthodox community that feels American society is not their friends,” said Blau. “One would have to think that anything that increases that fear is just going to make it more and more difficult to work with them in future.”

In the wake of Lebovits’ release, at least one advocate did not do his cause any favors. Rabbi Nachum Rosenberg, who regularly uses YouTube and a recorded telephone line to rail against abusers, sided with Kellner. In a telephone interview days after Kellner’s arrest for witness tampering, Rosenberg said that he did not know whether Kellner was guilty. “I wasn’t with him at the time,” he said. But shortly afterward, he asserted that the allegations against Kellner were false. “It’s a 100 percent hoax,” he said, before launching into a tirade against Hynes, which included the accusation that the D.A. turned a blind eye to abuse in return for favors from the strictly Orthodox hierarchy. (The D.A. declined to comment on this and other issues related to Lebovits’ case.)

Kellner denies the charges against him. Nevertheless, many advocates are wary of springing to his defense. One, who did not wish to be named, called Rosenberg’s allegiance with Kellner “unfortunate.” “You can’t maintain credibility in these cases by refusing to hear people are behaving badly,” the advocate said.

If Rosenberg comes out of the episode with his reputation diminished, then the D.A. fares little better. During Lebovits’ trial, his family claimed the accusations against him were financially motivated. Yet the D.A. appears to have done nothing to follow up on those claims.

Instead, Lebovits’ defense team hired a private detective to gather the evidence that eventually led to Kellner’s arrest. That detective, Joe Levin, was quoted soon after Lebovits’ release, on the blog Failed Messiah, saying that despite the material he gathered against Kellner, he still believed that Lebovits was guilty. But in a more recent interview, Levin claimed that he was misquoted. “He is clean,” Levin said of Lebovits.

What is clear is that Lebovits’ case highlights just how complex sexual-abuse prosecutions can be. Victims, often as a result of the trauma they have suffered, frequently appear in court with convictions for drug use or petty crime. Victims’ advocates can be erratic and prone to see conspiracy at every turn. Abusers often turn out to have once been abused themselves. Last year, Lebovits’ defense team was joined by the high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has called for a new trial. But Lebovits’ fate seems to rest on Kellner, whose next court date, a hearing, is currently set for September 6.

Paul Berger, a staff writer at the Forward, is the co-author or contributing editor of seven books. He has also written for the New York Times, the Daily, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Clarification, August 23: The phone conversation between reporter Paul Berger and Joe Levin, the private detective hired by Lebovits’ defense team, during which Levin said that Lebovits was “clean,” took place in April. Since then, Levin twice declined to comment further on the Lebovits case. In an interview with Tablet Magazine today, Levin said that he had made the original comment in haste, that he had not been misquoted on the Failed Messiah blog, and that he did not wish to talk further on the record because both the Lebovitz and Kellner cases are still open.

In truth, the coop’s nearly 16,000 members are actually a varied bunch, representing a cross-section of Brooklynites seen in few places outside of the subway. Yes, many are like me: a white, liberal, college-educated parent who lives in brownstone Brooklyn. But the aisles are also populated by Rastafarians in knit hats, silver-haired women surviving on Board of Education pensions, artsy kids who live with 10 roommates in Bushwick, and a sizable number of Orthodox Jews loading up their carts on Thursday nights in preparation for Shabbat.

It’s the last group that would likely feel most compelled to leave the coop were the proposed boycott instituted, although many nonreligious Jews and non-Jews probably would as well. Barbara Mazor, a coop member since 1988 who lives in Midwood and describes herself as “ultra Modern Orthodox,” is one of the most vociferous opponents of the proposed ban. She estimates that as many as 20 percent of members would leave the coop if such a ban did pass.

The effort to have the coop join the international campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has percolated on the fringes of the organization for years, largely through vociferous letter-writing to The Linewaiters’ Gazette, the coop’s house newspaper. Proponents consider Israel’s occupation of the West Bank illegal and its treatment of Palestinians unconscionable, and they believe in blocking the sale of Israeli goods as a nonviolent way to denounce such actions. (Identical measures have roiled other food cooperatives around the country, passing in Olympia, Wash., and defeated in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Sacramento and Davis, Calif.) The effect at the Park Slope Coop would be almost entirely symbolic since it currently carries only four Israeli products: paprika, bath salts, vegan marshmallows, and the SodaStream seltzer machine.

The issue was officially discussed at a monthly coop general meeting this winter, the first step in a long process to try to establish a ban. Because the coop is just that—a cooperative—it’s governed by deeply democratic processes that allow everyone a voice and often move at a glacial pace. At general meetings, for example, any member can submit any subject for discussion (this could hypothetically include, say, a discussion about whether the earth is flat or dill pickles are superior to half-sour). But on July 26, the proposed boycott finally came up for discussion at the general meeting. There was no vote on whether to put the matter before the entire membership, but that could eventually happen if attendees at a future general meeting vote in favor of holding a membership-wide referendum—a rare, slow, and expensive process that hasn’t occurred since the landmark “Should We Sell Meat and Beer?” vote of 2002. (This was a real referendum that did eventually pass.)

Anti-boycott members have been organizing in opposition to the effort, arguing that the proposal runs counter to the coop’s mission of being accessible to and respectful of all, and that the boycott movement is wrongly focused only on Israel’s role in the Middle East conflict and ultimately seeks the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

Barbara Mazor, the Orthodox Midwood resident who has been a coop member for 23 years, was incensed by the proposed ban. Last March she began organizing, launching a blog (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions really means Bigotry, Dishonesty, anti-Semitism,” it proclaims), founding the anti-boycott group of 130 members that dubbed itself “More Hummus, Please,” and spearheading the writing of group letters to The Linewaiters’ Gazette.

“I think what it’s really about is being able to circulate their Israel vilification propaganda to the 16,000-person membership, just constantly creating this ‘Israel is a bad state’ narrative,” Mazor said. “Do I think it would pass? I would hope not, but I don’t see it out of the realm of possibility. That’s why we’re campaigning against it.”

Pinny Lew, a Lubavitcher from Crown Heights and father of seven who has belonged to the coop for eight years, said that a neighbor of his left the coop about a year ago, disgusted that a boycott was being considered. Lew noted that despite his own family’s deep commitment to local, organic, and fair-trade food, they too would leave were the boycott instituted. He doubted it would come to that. “It’s hard for me to believe that more than 5 or 10 percent of the total coop population, confronted with the facts, would say, ‘I’m for this,’ ” he said. In my nonscientific polling of about a dozen religious Jewish members, the general consensus was that they would leave the coop if the boycott passed (as would I) but were skeptical that it will actually happen.

Another Orthodox man, from Cobble Hill, concurred. “I would feel ethically obligated to leave the coop, but since it’s the best source of food we have, it would be very difficult,” said the man, who didn’t want his name used. Referring to the international campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, he added, “It isn’t going to be able to have as much power here as they have in other communities. The value of political diversity will win out over imposed conformity.”

But Mazor is less sanguine. She fears that the boycott proposal might pass if it does ever come to a coop-wide referendum. The issue has already caused her to curtail her own coop shopping, but not for the reasons one might assume. “Because I’m spending so much time doing this,” she said of her campaigning, “I don’t have as much time to shop at the coop. I get takeout from Avenue J.”

CORRECTION, August 16: The Park Slope Food Coop is 38 years old, not 28. This error has been corrected.

The astute viewer will notice that, in both of these interludes, Kosov is wearing a large Star of David pendant that dangles above her dramatically pushed-up cleavage. In a phone interview this week, she said the message she heard was clear: “I’m looking for a Russian Jewish guy.” But, on the show, the word Jewish never enters the dialogue—not in an aside to the camera, not with Kosov’s mother, and not, eventually, with Paul, who gets the heave-ho over a plate of tuna tartare. “My parents, they came to America for a reason,” Kosov says, earnestly. “To look for Russians?” Paul retorts. “Yeah,” Kosov replies, without elaboration.

The pattern repeats itself throughout Russian Dolls, which is centered in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, long a Jewish neighborhood and today dominated by Russian Jewish émigrés. Its characters, almost all of them Jewish, arrived in the largest historical movement of Jews in the postwar era—but aren’t explicitly introduced as Jews.

It’s tempting to chalk up the disconnect to the producers’ desire to expand their potential audience or, equally plausibly, to head off criticism from the Jewish community in Brooklyn, which circulated petitions last winter objecting to the program’s display of outrageous materialism. But it turns out this show, as trashy and juvenile as anything else in the reality genre, reveals a deeper sociological truth about its subjects: These Soviet Jews, singled out and in some cases persecuted in their native country for being Jews, didn’t come to New York for the freedom to live as Jews—or, for that matter, to assimilate as Americans in the tradition of their Eastern European predecessors. What Russian Dolls confirms is that, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its Jewish exiles have found in America a place where they can finally live freely as Russians.

“For most Russian Jews it’s so entangled,” said Alina Dizik, one of the show’s creators, about religious and national identity. “You really can’t separate one from the other, and most of us are so secular that a lot of the Jewish traditions get mixed up with the Russian traditions.” She added that getting a reality show is proof that the Russian community has arrived—as the show’s promo says, in block letters, “The Russians aren’t coming, the Russians are here.” The goal was to broadcast some hallmarks of Russian-American life without getting too deeply into the heavy details of the Cold War. Later episodes include nods to Jewish life in Brighton, including a fashion show benefiting an Israeli charity, Dizik said, but the show starts at the beginning. “We tried to explain as much as possible without being boring,” she said. “There’s no Russian history, but we explain what a banya is, and what some of the customs are in terms of going out to eat, and family relationships.”

Which seems to suit the show’s stars just fine. “There are people who are anti-Semitic who will say, this one is only half-Russian,” explained Michael Levitis, one of the show’s main characters, in an interview this week. “The only person who makes this distinction is anti-Semites and Communists.”

The Brighton Beach nightclub Levitis runs with his wife, Marina, is called Rasputin and operates in high Moscow style, with a cabaret dinner show and a menu of shellfish and other trayf luxuries. (Levitis was sentenced this month to three years’ probation after pleading guilty to lying to FBI agents about his involvement in an alleged plan to bribe New York State Sen. Carl Kruger.) “To American people, especially outside of New York, if you came from Russia, you’re Russian,” Marina Levitis said on the phone. “They don’t care if you’re Jewish or Christian or ethnically Russian or not.” But, she added, “We don’t pretend to be Russian Russian. We don’t pretend to be anything other than what we are.”

She’s right: As with Kosov’s Star of David necklace, there are plenty of subtle clues that the Levitises are Jews. They are introduced on the show with a montage that includes a wedding glamour shot in which Michael sports a large velvet kippah, and the camera pans over a mezuzah nailed to their front doorpost. But the show doesn’t explain that they met as students at Jewish high schools and send their own children to a yeshiva elementary school. Instead, the show plays up their mini-oligarch habits. In an on-camera shopping spree, Marina tries on a $28,000 pair of 11-carat diamond bangles, noting approvingly, “Big and blingy and definitely Russian style.” Meanwhile, Michael’s 56-year-old mother, Eva, reveals her long-dormant dream to be onstage and enters her Slavic belly-dancing act in a local talent show.

“I was in Russia engineer,” Eva tells Marina. “All my life I loved to sing and dance, but I never had a chance to do this in Russia.” In New York, she does.

In 1984, Mondrowitz was accused of sexually abusing four Italian boys. Since then, the number of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims has been estimated at close to a hundred—making him, shockingly, an average pedophile. But given the shame and secrecy surrounding sexual abuse, and his broad network of contacts, the number of alleged victims could actually be much higher. Moshe Rosenbaum, one of the activists who first aired concerns about Mondrowitz in the late 1980s, estimates the number to be 300. If Mondrowitz were to be convicted of so many crimes, he would be the worst sexual predator in the Orthodox community on record.

But that would require a case to be brought against him—which, for a variety of troubling reasons, has never happened.

This fall, the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, will hear oral arguments pertaining to the release of documents about Mondrowitz. Michael Lesher, an attorney representing several of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims, asked the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office for the documents under New York’s Freedom of Information Law in 2007. A trial court initially ruled in favor of Lesher’s clients, but that verdict was overturned unanimously last year on appeal.

The fact that the Court of Appeals will hear the case is a significant victory for Lesher, who believes that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes stopped pursuing Mondrowitz, who’d fled to Israel, because of pressure from ultra-Orthodox voters. Although it seems that Mondrowitz could have been extradited to Brooklyn to stand trial as early as 1989, Hynes’ office waited two decades, until 2007, to launch the extradition process. Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, said that if Mondrowitz ever returns to the United States, he will be arrested and tried. “We don’t reveal files on open cases, and courts have upheld that,” he said. “I know we have handled this case properly.”

Lesher disagrees and is looking for a smoking gun to prove his theory. But even if he is wrong about Hynes, the Mondrowitz case—or non-case—has involved a series of brilliant two-steps on the part of a community that is looking to face its demons quietly. But the story, in part due to the complexities of extradition, simply won’t go away.

***

Mark Weiss, who is represented by Lesher, is one of Mondrowitz’s alleged victims. Today, he is a frequent speaker at Jewish sexual abuse conferences; in 2006, he appeared on a Nightline segment about Mondrowitz. In 1980, he was a 13-year-old in Chicago—a good kid with some philosophical differences from his ultra-Orthodox parents. “I didn’t see eye-to-eye with them,” he said last month by phone from New Jersey. “But I wasn’t stealing cars or taking drugs.” When his junior high school asked him not to come back, his parents sent him to a psychologist in Brooklyn named Avrohom Mondrowitz.

The Weiss and Mondrowitz families were friendly. They had lived close to each other in Chicago. Mondrowitz’s father was a popular figure in the community, both a scholar who studied in the Mir yeshiva and a businessman in charge of several nursing homes. According to a family friend from the neighborhood, the senior Mondrowitz was part of the group of Mir students who escaped Poland before World War II through Shanghai, China. Avrohom, who was born in 1947, moved to New York in the late 1970s to be closer to the Ger Hasidic community in Borough Park. By the time Weiss was sent to Mondrowitz, the older man had already established himself as a psychologist whose patients came to him through a wide network in the Orthodox community, including the Ohel Jewish social service agency, according to the Orthodox Jewish website Vos iz Neias? and other leading members of the community. (Ohel has publicly denied employing Mondrowitz but is more circumspect about referrals. “Given the lapse of time, it is impossible to determine whether any referrals were ever made to Mondrowitz,” a spokesperson said.) Mondrowitz agreed to treat Weiss by taking him for a week into his Borough Park house. Unknown to Weiss’ parents, Mondrowitz’s family was out of town, which left him alone with the teenaged Weiss.

Weiss remembers Mondrowitz as a dazzling figure. “He was just the essence of coolness, especially for a little yeshiva kid showing up,” Weiss told me. “He wined and dined me. He took me out to eat. He took me out to an amusement park. He basically showed me a good time and gave me lots of positive attention. I soaked it up. He was grooming me.” At night, Weiss said Mondrowitz gently persuaded him to sleep in Mondrowitz’s bed. (He declined to go into detail about what would happen next, but he alleges sexual abuse.) “He was very smooth and manipulative and really gave me no pause for thinking anything was inappropriate,” Weiss said. His descriptions are similar to those of the five other alleged victims represented by Lesher, none of whom are named in the appeal.

Part of Mondrowitz’s appeal relied on the stigma toward mental health professionals in the Orthodox community. “He had this reputation of being a wonderful guy and being very helpful,” said Deborah Dienstag, a physician who works with the Orthodox community. “People don’t want to go to psychologists, since there’s stigma. There is no stigma going to rabbis.” According to Jeff Dion, of the National Center for Victims of Crime, an advocacy group, certain abusers set themselves up as pillars of the community, targeting victims who are troubled, outcasts, or young people with drug and alcohol abuse problems. If a victim then chooses to disclose acts, he said, “it becomes the word of a ‘bad kid’ against the pillar of the community.”

In the years following Weiss’ visit, Mondrowitz’s star rose. He hosted a popular program called Life Is for Living on the now-defunct local radio station WNYN. “Don’t picture this man living in isolation or even living a double life,” said Lesher, the lawyer. “Don’t picture someone who was off in the corner abusing kids who came to him. He was very industrious about bringing victims to him and integrating himself into the institutional structure that made it possible. He founded a school. He got victims through the school. He ran a psychology practice and promoted it with a radio program. He got hundreds of kids.”

***

For years, no Jewish victim spoke out against Mondrowitz. But accusers say he also went after Italian boys on his ethnically mixed Brooklyn block; residents recalled him showering gifts on the neighbors’ kids. In 1984, someone made an anonymous phone call to two New York Police Department detectives, Pat Kehoe and Sal Catalfamo.“I never had received a call like that in my whole career in the New York City Police Department,” Kehoe told ABC News. “There was a rabbi and gave the name and he was abusing people on this block. And he said if you go knocking on doors, you’ll find victims.” Both detectives are now retired and, through another police officer, declined to talk to me about the case.

Responding to the tip, the detectives went down the block, knocked on doors, and quickly located four Italian victims who were willing to press charges ranging from sexual abuse to sodomy. “When people finally went to the police, it was the Italian kids,” Lesher said. “Several victims have told me that their parents were instructed not to approach the grand jury. Some victims were discouraged from reporting Mondrowitz’s crimes. I can only assume the rest were, also.”

Continue reading: the community’s response, extradition, and “the guy who broke the ice.” Or view as a single page.

I’m not a lonely old man living alone in the middle of nowhere. I am a 36-year-old New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, and I have many friends scattered throughout the five boroughs. It’s just that I’m not used to meeting neighbors and sharing no more than vague and grudgingly polite pleasantries with them. Where I come from—the Hasidic communities of Borough Park, Brooklyn, and New Square and Monsey, N.Y., northwest of the city—the neighborly indifference that most New Yorkers are used to doesn’t exist.

In the past, each time I moved to a new home my fellow Hasidic neighbors came knocking. They brought piping hot pans of potato kugel, plates of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and rolls of cinnamon cake. Then they would ask for my name and occupation and spend a few minutes trying to place me within an appropriate sphere of mutual friends, relatives, and acquaintances. In my case it was usually, “Deen? I don’t know any Deens, but I know a Deem. You sure your name’s not Deem.” I was sure it wasn’t.

Several years ago, I decided to discard religious observance and the austere lifestyle with which I was raised. I left my long black coat and black hat to gather dust in the storage room of a friend’s basement along with a small collection of religious texts and audio-cassettes of old Talmud lectures. My ex-wife and five children moved to an apartment in New Square, and I rented a small apartment not far from them, on the outskirts of Monsey. I wanted to live close to my children and my siblings and their families. I also found it comforting to remain living among Hasidim, even though I no longer lived like them. If others thought them freakishly stuck in 18th-century Poland, I thought visiting 18th-century Poland was just fine as long as the kugel was hot and the neighbors lent a hand when my car battery needed a boost.

However, seduced by lower rents, cool bars, and the prospect of being closer to friends in Brooklyn, I decided two years ago to move to Bushwick—Brooklyn’s newest bastion of hipster faux-bohemianism. There are many many differences here, of course, but I was most struck by the standoffishness of my new neighbors. It started the first day, after I parked my rented U-Haul in front of my new apartment and unloaded the last items from the truck. I was sitting on the stoop for a quick cigarette, and just as I crushed the butt underfoot, three of my upstairs neighbors stepped out of the building, two of them outfitted in vintage sneakers and plaid shirts, with scraggly bed-head hairdos. The third had long bleached-blond hair and black leggings and carried a beat-up guitar case.

I smiled and introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Shulem. Just moved in.”

They gave me limp handshakes, mumbled their names—the bleach blond, I remember, was, Brian—and took off.

Later that night, I was kept awake until 4 a.m. by the guitar-playing in their apartment, which was directly above mine. I wasn’t disturbed by the music. Instead, I wondered how I might join their jam session. But these people and their ways were strange to me, and I imagined a conversation stunted by our lack of common interests. The more prudent approach, I decided, would be to make their slow and steady acquaintance.

Two months passed, however, and the hipsters on the third floor had yet to make another appearance. Weren’t they curious, I wondered, who I was, or if we had any mutual friends or relatives? Granted, it was unlikely, but how did they know?

One day, I sat on the front stoop and ached for some casual neighborly conversation. From the corner came two young guys in white shirts wearing backpacks, who, for a moment—and I don’t know why—I imagined were lovers. As they came within earshot, they gave me friendly smiles. One of them offered a cheery “Hi.” They turned out to be Mormon elders. Whatever, I thought, and decided to engage in a theological debate. But the elders didn’t know why one should take the Bible as the word of God other than the fact that they fervently believed that one should. Then they offered me some pamphlets and went on their missioning way.

I went back to thinking about my upstairs neighbors. I craved for a more substantial engagement with them, but they always flitted by, and the opportunity seemed maddeningly elusive. A friend, another ex-Hasid who lived several blocks away, suggested they might just be very quiet hipsters, that he knew plenty of hipsters who were perfectly friendly, and besides, there was no such thing as a hipster. “Call it what you will,” I said, “but I’ve got some pretty strange neighbors. And Mormons they’re not.”

Several more months passed. My upstairs neighbors appeared rarely, and when they did we exchanged the briefest and most reticent of pleasantries. I couldn’t explain why I thought about them; it wasn’t that I needed friends. I just wanted some of the old inappropriate nosiness, dammit.

Of course, I could’ve initiated some nosiness of my own. I could’ve discarded the advice a secular friend once gave me regarding the non-Hasidim of New York: You’re allowed only two questions for every one statement. Secular people, I was told, don’t take kindly to interrogations. Unlike Hasidim, who will ask a dozen or more deeply personal questions within 60 seconds of meeting you—including, among other things, your amount of credit card debt and the amount you receive in food stamps—non-Hasidim, I was told, prefer small talk on topics of no real concern to anyone: the long line at the bagel shop, the odd smell on the subway platform, annoying Park Slope mothers.

Eventually I gave up. I’d hear my neighbors on the staircase in the hallway, or I’d see them chaining their bicycles to the second-floor guardrail, and if I said, “Hi,” I got a “Hi” in return, but never more. If I made a remark about the weather, they said, “Yeah.” If I said their party the other night sounded like fun, they said, “Yeah. It was pretty dope.” (Dope? Where were these people from?) If I remarked that someone really ought to stop keeping the outside door open, I got an odd look followed by another “Yeah.”

Halloween came around, and a friend and I were leaving for a party when one of the neighbors passed in the hallway wearing an assortment of odd garments in a variety of colors.

“Are you a hamburger?” my friend asked.

The neighbor suddenly turned. “Yes!” she said. “You realized! That’s so cool!”

My jaw hung open. It wasn’t exactly a conversation, but it was certainly more than the usual monosyllabic response. But before I could say anything she was down the stairs and out the door.

The next day, outside on the front stoop, the girl appeared again, this time sans costume.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re the girl with the hamburger costume.”

“Yeah,” she said, and walked off.

Shulem Deen, a former Skver Hasid, is the founding editor of Unpious.com.

Scattered across the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of Flatbush, Borough Park, Crown Heights, and Williamsburg, the independent shomrim are ancient organizations trapped in a 21st-century game of tug of war. As a kind of shtetl police, the groups are devoted to protecting its streets, its secrets, and, ultimately, the Hasidim who share them. But as neighborhood watch groups, the shomrim must meet the legal and social demands of secular society. Caught in the middle are its patrol members—men by turns open and reserved, trusting and deeply paranoid. Despite a confluence of traditional indicators such as high unemployment and recession, national crime rates hover (puzzlingly) at their lowest in 40 years. Still, the shomrim continue to prove their unofficial value to the New York Police Department even as the relationship between the organizations can occasionally grow contentious. Just last week, the neighborhood watch in Crown Heights, also in Brooklyn, posted a complaint that they were victims of a targeted ticketing campaign, totaling over $3,000 in fines, by officers of the NYPD’s 71st Precinct. As New York plunges into another long, hot summer, the shomrim aren’t likely to cede much turf.

***

The word shomrim is derived from the Hebrew shomer, which means to guard, preserve, or protect. Founded in 1924 by Police Captain Jacob Kaminsky, the Shomrim Society of New York, like so many Jewish, social institutions of its time, was established to help preserve the group’s ethnic identity. According to its website, the organization was actually born of an anti-Semitic slur: Kaminsky was on patrol with a nightstick tucked under his arm when a city resident suggested he might feel more comfortable with a hunk of salami. By 1937, well over 400 salami-bearing officers were serving as shomrim across the city.

The Williamsburg Shomrim grew out of a purely Samaritan desire to do good for the local community, according to Pollack. The patrol started in 1977 when Moses Hoffman, a local rabbi, discovered a man lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. After alerting the police to the attack, Hoffman returned to his Williamsburg apartment and began devising a plan for a neighborhood watch—one he would establish in his synagogue the following morning. “At that time, the crime rate in this area was practically double what it is now,” Pollack says. “Hoffman’s idea was to help protect the community. That meant everyone—black, Hispanic, or Hasidic.”

Today, the Williamsburg Shomrim employs more than 60 volunteers, at least half of whom make themselves available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. While the law prohibits them from carrying firearms, they can make citizens’ arrests. More important, their constant communication with the New York Police Department helps deter would-be assailants and accelerate the apprehension of suspected criminals.

The daily routine of the shomrim patrol is at once thrilling and banal. On any given day, they may be called upon to tail a suspected burglar down a narrow side street or pry open a bathroom door for a nervous mother whose child has locked himself inside, identify a mugger at the local precinct, or provide a makeshift pest control to an apartment owner with a squirrel scampering about his living room. “It’s rare that someone will get called more than three or four times a week, but he has to be ready—and for anything,” Pollack says. (The “he” here is instructive; while women occasionally work out of their living rooms as dispatchers, they are not allowed to patrol for the shomrim because some—though not all—Hasidic rabbis believe it is inappropriate for women to drive cars.) All members are required to take turns “rolling” in a privately owned car, each of which is equipped with a two-way radio that allows them to communicate with fellow volunteers of the neighborhood watch as well as an operator at the 90th Precinct.

Over the past year, the organization has had no shortage of reasons to call in. On December 7, 2010, a local CBS News affiliate ran the report: “Cops: Hispanic Teens Beat Up Hasidic Jews ‘For Fun,’ ” after 44-year-old Moshe Guttman was assaulted returning home from a Hanukkah party in Williamsburg earlier that evening. Two weeks before, the same assailants left Joel Weinberger, a 26-year-old teacher and father of four, with a broken leg and a jaw that needed to be wired shut. At the time of the incident, family spokesman Isaac Abraham told reporters: “All his religious articles—his hat, his jacket, his fringes—were ripped apart. I’m not the best investigator in the world, but what do you think would lead to a bias crime?”

Pollack, who has been with the patrol since the branch’s birth and has lived in Williamsburg his entire life, offers a more measured response. “I’d be reluctant to get the bias unit involved unless I saw something really flagrant, like a swastika spray-painted on the walls of a school,” he says. “I won’t say that anti-Semitism has completely disappeared, but the neighborhood has changed. And that’s a good thing.” Pollack leans back in his chair and stretches his long, bony arms like a scarecrow. His grin speaks not only to his pride in the work of the shomrim but to the greater diversity of the community it’s been assigned to protect.

While the basic mission of the neighborhood watch has remained the same for the past 30 years, the ethnic make-up of the community it patrols continues to evolve. In 2000, more than 160,000 people lived in Brooklyn Community District 1, which consists of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Of that number, about 40 percent identify as Hasidic Jewish. The vast majority of the Hasidic population belongs to the Satmar sect, an immigrant movement comprised almost entirely of Romanian and Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many have inherited a complicated relationship with authority. “The Shomrim has always served as a kind of liaison between the community and the police,” Pollack says. “The older generation is still afraid of police uniforms, and they pass this fear, phobia, whatever you want to call it, to their children. We have to explain that the NYPD is there to help.”

Almost by default, the Shomrim is an exclusive club: The Yiddish barrier all but guarantees that the organization is composed entirely of Hasidic Jewish men, and its elaborate screening process tries to ensure that only the most trusted and valued members of the community can join. According to Pollack, the Williamsburg Shomrim recently accepted three new members only after weeks of investigation.

Perhaps no one is more familiar with the organization’s membership policies than Jacob Hoffman, a Satmar school administrator and the eldest son of the Williamsburg Shomrim’s founding father, Moses Hoffman. Despite a healthy paunch and an electric red beard that hangs below his Adam’s apple, he looks at least a decade younger than his 53 years. While Pollack wanders toward a screen displaying a live feed from the front door surveillance camera, Hoffman assumes a seat adjacent to me at the office’s Formica table. His eyes are set very close to one another, and his gaze is unblinking. If Pollack has revealed himself as a kind of gregarious good cop, Hoffman seems primed to play the part of the bad cop. When asked what kind of patrol member he typically recruits, he says bluntly, “Someone prepared to leave his family on the Sabbath to go look for a lost child.”

As the organization’s vice-president, Hoffman is responsible for hiring new recruits, organizing the Shomrim’s patrol schedule, and arranging its biennial training regimen at 1 Police Plaza, the NYPD headquarters. Hoffman sees volunteering his time and money to the neighborhood watch as a family obligation. If he harbors any feelings of resentment toward his father for the burden he’s inherited, he refuses to reveal them. “It’s a question of honor,” he says, as if explaining a simple math equation to a child. “We honor those who give back to our community.”

Pollack is reluctant to discuss any specific cases, but he admits that the neighborhood watch sometimes acts as a buffer between the police and the Hasidic community. If, for example, a Hasidic person commits a crime against a fellow Hasid, he or another member of the Shomrim might take it upon himself to convince the offended party not to press charges. Pollack insists that the Shomrim file a police report for every crime that’s reported, but that’s as much as he’s willing to concede. “If I told you anything more, I’d be finished on the street,” he says. “No one in the community would ever speak to me again.”

***

In February, administrators at the Crown Heights neighborhood watch posted a message on the organization’s Facebook page inviting members of the local community to a dinner marking the first anniversary of the death of its coordinator Reb. Isaac Zellermaier. After my calls to the Shomrim headquarters went unreturned, I decided to attend.

Ateres Miriam Simcha Hall, the site of the event, is tucked away in the basement of an unassuming row house on Carroll Street in Brooklyn, a scant few blocks from the central headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. When I stepped into the harsh glow of the dining hall, the conversation—a merry mélange of English and Yiddish—dropped to a low murmur.

“Can I help you?” inquired a man in his thirties, his face a mess of pockmarks and frizzy, red hair.

Knowing the answer, I asked if this was the meeting of the Crown Heights Shomrim.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, his features suddenly brightening. After guiding me gently to an open seat at the table closest to the dining hall’s exit, the host waved his hand at a tight-faced young man wearing a stylish set of black eyeglasses and a gray pullover. But for the thick nest of hair lining his cheeks and neck, he looked like the captain of a high school debate team.

He introduced himself as Ben Lifshitz, head of media relations. “You really shouldn’t be here,” the 24-year-old warned in a voice that sounded a pitch too high for someone trying to impose authority. Lifshitz works as a freelance photographer when he’s not managing the publicity requests of the Crown Heights Shomrim. (“The New York Post, the New York Times, they’ve all tried to talk to us at one time or another,” he said.) On this evening, he was engaged in both occupations. After grudgingly agreeing to let me stay for the memorial service, he hopped up from his chair and walked briskly across the room toward a tripod set up against the opposite wall. Lifshitz swiveled the camera’s lens toward the end of the U-shaped table, where a trio of rabbis sat in silence.

A hush fell over the dining hall and Rabbi Moshe Bogomilsky, a weary-looking septuagenarian with a thick pair of eyeglasses and a sagacious white beard to match, cleared his throat. What followed was a fable about the importance of giving back to the community, with a few tortuous detours about exiles and the redemptive power of a loving and supportive wife. Then Shloime Zellermaier rose from the seat adjacent to Bogomilsky and added some brief but pointed words about his father, the late coordinator: “It was Hashem that guided him and Hashem that helped him pull his people out of jail when he needed to. My father always believed that if you do kindness to a fellow Jew, God will do kindness to you.”

• On Syria, does U.S. policy contradict itself? Very well then, argues Aaron David Miller, it contradicts itself. He explains why. [FP]

• Oh. My. God. An Israeli falafel truck dukes it out with a Palestinian-owned restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Instant and essential meta-analysis here.) [Brooklyn Paper via The Awl]

• There’s a lot wrong with Roger Cohen’s piece on Tonys Judt and Kushner—Judt was serious about being a one-stater, for example—but it is worth reading if only for the quotes from Kushner. (And here’s an alternative view.) [IHT]

• Friend-of-The-Scroll Joshua Foer discusses Jews as “People of Memory” and his new book, Moonwalking with Einstein. [Moment/JI Daily]

• Adam Levin, author of The Instructions, won the New York Public Library’s prestigious Young Lions Fiction Award. [Galleycat]

Just … just watch this. Now. And know that The Scroll’s new official catch-phrase is, “WHAT’S A MENSCH?”

Mr. Selig, you are also a Jew, and therefore probably have an intuitive grasp of the connection the American Jewish community feels to this franchise.

Mr. Selig, sunshine and palm trees are great, and Dodger Stadium is wonderful: It makes you feel like you have stepped into the California scenes of Mad Men. L.A. has a very solid baseball fanbase, too. No disrespect here.

But, Mr. Selig, if you want to be remembered as a hero, you have one obvious move left: Move the team back to Brooklyn.

The borough is about to get a basketball team. It has experienced a resurgence that its newly team-less denizens of a half-century ago could never have imagined. It is therefore time. It is past time. The front entrance can even be named after Vin Scully.

L.A.? L.A. can have the Mets.

Baseball Taking Control of Dodgers’ Operations [NYT]
Related: Hit the Road, Frank [Slate]
The Dodgers: Los Angeles’s Answer to General Motors [The Atlantic Wire]

“It was something in me,” he said over lunch at a Brooklyn café near the apartment he shares with his wife, Liat, and their 2-year-old son, Zohar (glancingly named after Zohar Argov, Israel’s first breakout Mizrahi pop star). “On this instrument, the oud, I could express that. Later, I listened to recordings from that time.” He turned his head to the side, laughing, and lifted his hand dismissively. “It wasn’t good.”

Avital’s humility belies the substance and import of his music: Over the last few years he has become a leading force in a hybrid that synthesizes American jazz, Israeli, Yemeni, Moroccan, and other Arab styles into something genuinely new and vital for its connection to a shared Middle Eastern past. And unlike the self-conscious projects in which many musicians cloak themselves—garments as easily thrown off as put on—Avital’s work has emerged in the course of his search to better understand his identity as a jazz musician, as an Israeli, and as an heir to a Mizrahi cultural tradition historically viewed as inferior by Israel’s Ashkenazi elite.

In 2008, the New Jerusalem Orchestra premiered Avital’s “Debka Fantasia,” an extended composition that unearths the Bedouin roots beneath Israeli folk tunes such as “At Adama (You, Soil).” And in 2009, he presented his “Song of the Earth,” a Middle-Eastern Afro-Jewish musical suite for 13 pieces at Merkin Concert Hall. On March 9, he appeared at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, with the Israeli-Yemenite singer Ravid Kahalani, presenting their joint project, “Yemen Blues.” And on April 2, Avital will perform again with his quartet at the Jazz Gallery, also in New York.

“Omer’s work is very important politically because it represents part of a trend in Israel over the last 10 or 15 years of Mizrahi Sephardim finding public space to reclaim identity,” said Carmel Raz, an Israeli-American violinist and doctoral candidate in music theory at Yale who has performed with Avital. “In the development of Israeli identity, you can be Arab and Jewish and live in Israel. They’re not mutually exclusive. The stage is now open for a broad way of being Jewish.”

Listen to “Eli,” by the group Yemen Blues:

Avital, 39, who has been known to wear a Jewfro, long sideburns, and beads that evoke an Israeli Superfly, grew up in Givatayim, then a middle-class Labor Party redoubt east of Tel Aviv. His late father, Eliyahu, was from a family of mughrabim, North African Jews from Morocco, who emigrated in the late 19th century. His mother, Dalia, comes from a Yemenite family originally from Ta’izz, near Sana’a, home of the great 17th-century poet Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, celebrated by Jews and Arabs alike as the “Shakespeare of Yemen.” While his grandparents prayed as Jews, and lived among Arabs, his parents sought to become secular moderns. Eliyahu, a photographer and free spirit, introduced Omer to big band jazz, Frank Sinatra, European classical, and Arab traditional music. Dalia, dogged and practical, worked for the phone company and pushed her husband to Hebraicize his last name, Abutbul, which means “Father of the Drum.” Abutbul became Avital (“Father of the Dew”), as Israeli as Smith or Jones is American.

“When I grew up, Mizrahi culture was considered garbage compared to the European; nothing to take seriously,” said Avital. “For my parents, there was a survival thing that was key. They wanted for me to be part of something, not grow up in the ghetto. My mother, who is dark-skinned, really suffered. They tried to integrate. They joined the Labor party and believed in the Zionist ideal, but they were laughed at.”

While proclaiming Israel open to all Jews, David Ben-Gurion sometimes referred to Mizrahim as “savages.” “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs,” he wrote in the mid-’60s. “We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.” As the historian Avishai Margalit summarizes: “For the Labor leaders only Ashkenazi Jews had ‘culture’; Oriental Jews had at best a ‘heritage.’ ” In 1977 Menachem Begin exploited their seething resentment, when his right-wing Herut party swept into office with widespread Mizrahi support.

As a boy, Avital won a children’s songwriting contest and began to play an old guitar. He got good enough to audition for the Thelma Yellin School of the Performing Arts, Israel’s predominant incubator of young talent. After a botched first attempt, his mother’s friend, a Yemeni cleaning lady who worked for the school’s music director, got him a second chance. He was accepted, and though generally ostracized for being an Oriental Jew, he was inspired by the sounds of jazz and blues around him and gave up classical guitar for jazz and the acoustic bass. He came under the sway of Emil Ram, a bassist who had studied in New York with Barry Harris at the legendary pianist’s Jazz Cultural Center. Ram, along with the late pianist Amit Golan, who also studied with Harris, carried back to Israel a muscular sense of swing and a historically rooted jazz lexicon.

“He had everything,” remembered Avital. “Meeting Emil meant finding someone who could give you a taste of what was really happening. From then on, I always had Mingus and Ellington in the back of my head.” Avital’s parents felt comfortable watching Omer play jazz, which resonated with Arab music’s tradition of incantation, improvisation, and trance-inducing rhythms.

Before he could pursue a jazz career, Avital, like most high-school graduates in Israel, was compelled to perform mandatory military service, which after a month of basic training he spent in the Air Force Orchestra. At first motivated by a sense of belonging, Avital soon found the experience a nightmare. He was disgusted by what he saw as the army’s anti-Arab and anti-Mizrahi sentiments. He became depressed, buoying himself with incessant chatter about his latest jazz obsession, Clifford Brown, the American bebop trumpeter of the ’50s who co-led a landmark group with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

“They treat you like human garbage. I met the worst people I ever met. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be living in this country. If this is what’s it’s about, it’s not for me,’ ” he said. “My commander hated me. He’d yell, ‘If I hear the words Clifford Brown one more time, I’m going to send you to grease the bombs in the South!’ I was a bad influence in the orchestra.”

In 1992, following his discharge from the army, Avital boarded a plane with his friend, trombonist Avi Lebovich (the renowned bassist Avishai Cohen was on another flight the same day), and flew to New York to pursue his calling.

“I knew I could play and that what I do doesn’t interest anyone in Israel,” he said. “New York was the place. It allowed me to be something I couldn’t have been without it. I had two dreams: One was to play with the musicians I admired, and the second was to just become a good musician. I just wanted to get better.”

Listen to “Brighter Future,” from Live at Smalls:

Unbeknownst to him, Avital arrived just as a great wave of young jazz talent—global in orientation and possessed of shocking technical proficiency—was cresting in New York. Much of that talent revolved around the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program, where Avital spent a semester getting oriented before continuing his studies at Mannes College. In the early ’90s, New York was full of small bars and restaurants—St. Marks Bar, Nuyorican Poets Café, Zinc Bar, Jules, the Village Gate, the First Street Café—where musicians could play and hang out. (What few are left pay the same or less today as they did then, a sign of a struggling bohemia after dark.) Avital used these opportunities to learn standard tunes and build his confidence.

Now known for the missile-like speed, trajectory, and impact of his improvisation, Avital once remarked that he developed his sound not by acceding to some higher plane of musical understanding, but by deciding at some point only to play—to make heard—those ideas to which he could commit totally: strength through self-editing. To supplement his income he worked for a moving company run by his now brother-in-law.

In 1993 while on a gig at the Village Gate, Avital was heard by the bassist Dwayne Burno, who recommended him to saxophonist Antonio Hart. Hart took him on tour and featured him on his next record, along with Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on Miles Davis’ landmark 1959 recording, Kind of Blue.

Avital also formed his own band, a sextet that featured four tenors, which appeared regularly at Smalls, one of the Greenwich Village clubs where the new wave of young musicians pooled.

“He brought so much, man,” remembered tenor saxophonist Charles Owens, a member of Avital’s group, who plays with a meaty sound that recalls Sonny Rollins. “He was such a badass that when people from Israel were noticed subsequently, they were always compared to him, which was a gift and a curse for them, I suppose, as leaders. I don’t know if he had a specific agenda for an Israeli sound. He was just writing what was in his heart. He brought together jazz, French impressionist harmonies, Middle Eastern rhythms and tonalities, as well as a love for four-part harmony. His pieces were very challenging, not necessarily because there were a lot of notes, but say for example holding the lowest note on your horn for measure after measure, and at a piano or even double piano level. What a great feeling when it came together. Magic.”

New York at that time was, Avital said, an ideal place for exploring his multiple identities. He and guitarist Amos Hoffman would hang out with their friend, a Palestinian oud player and Williamsburg falafel shop owner named Najib Shaheen (brother of the oud player and activist Simon Shaheen), who before buzzing them in would answer his intercom in a mock sinister baritone, “Go away you filthy Jews. You are not welcome here.” In Israel, Avital would take trips to the Sinai desert and spend time with Bedouins. He started speaking with his father in greater depth about North African music and reading about Israel before 1948, when strains of Zionism looked to the Arab, rooted in the land, as an example to emulate rather than a threat to defend against. All the while, his music, characterized by its tuneful gritty romanticism, became more distinctive, personal, and searching.

“I made my own music and people wrote about it. They treated me like I was saying something,” he said. “That wouldn’t have happened in Israel. In New York you can be a human being and think for yourself. In Israel you have to make it your career to think for yourself.”

Listen to “Faith,” from Arrival:

In 1997 Impulse! records signed Avital and prepared to release his first record, Devil Head, but before it could do so, the label dropped the project.

“I was a little disappointed,” said Avital. “I had that band which was going super well. I found myself doing the same things. What do you do next? I had the feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I met Liat and started this long-distance relationship.”

Avital had been traveling more regularly to Israel, which in the wake of the Oslo accords was slowly becoming a more hopeful place. “Once you had that possibility for peace, it was amazing, that whole Middle Eastern sensibility came to life,” he said. “Israel became a much hipper place for about three years. Everyone was going to India and they brought back a looser vibe. The old Israel was ending. A sense of possibility opens people up.”

Avital started to study Moroccan music and played with Israeli-Arab musicians in Nazareth and the Galilee. He played in joint Jewish and Arab bands with Arnie Lawrence, the American saxophonist who created the jazz program at the New School, made aliyah, and founded the International Center for Creative Music. He moved to Ein Kerem shortly after the events of Sept. 11 and began a course of study combining the European and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

In 2005, longing for the “openness of jazz and society” in New York, Avital returned and began to further develop the concepts he had been working on in Israel. He resurrected his own groups and released a string of albums on Smalls Records, the club’s label. And with the percussionist Yair Harel, the director of the Israel Festival, he co-founded the New Jerusalem Orchestra, which draws on traditional piyutim, or liturgical poems, and the work of modern Israeli poets.

“I’m really trying to rebuild a bridge to the past. I have to learn this tradition. I have to know it,” said Avital. “It’s part of my body. I have to not lose it for the future.”

Avital’s vision of a shared Middle Eastern sound—exuberant, inclusive, and hopeful—could easily provide the soundtrack to the region’s fast-changing present. “In Israel, and in the United States, the Arab world can be seen as unknown, as one block of darkness,” he told me. “And now all of a sudden it’s like the world is seeing the people of these countries for the first time.”

Near Grand Army Plaza he recounted a recent session he had in his apartment with an Iraqi-American trumpeter, a Syrian singer, a Moroccan Berber percussionist, and a Palestinian oud player.

“It was a great vibe,” he said, smiling.

Ben Waltzer is a jazz pianist, journalist, and assistant director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University.

Annoying as it is when the Times caters to what it thinks its young readers are (as brilliantly mocked by news anchor Brian Williams, who noted that the Grey Lady treats Brooklyn like it’s “like Marrakesh”), I resent that shamelessness less than the paper of record’s continued obeisance to nonsensical Boomer pieties like the notion—articulated by the donation of space on the Sunday Op-Ed Page—that any of us should pay any attention to Fran Lebowitz.

Introduction by the Author [NYT]
Related: Boulevardier [Tablet Magazine]

• Russian President Medvedev visited the West Bank and expressed Russian support for a Palestinian state, and was eagerly cheered. [NYT]

• An appeals court may have saved one Satmar rabbi ten years in jail, ruling that one count of incest, involving an incident somewhere in Belgium, Israel, or points in between, could not be brought stateside. Ugh. [NY Post]

• Speaking of which, Brooklyn is a magical place—like Marrakesh!—where Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in peace. [Guardian/Le Monde/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Arab leaders look on Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution with fear even as duplicates in their countries seem unlikely, at least in the short-term. [NYT]

• Don Kirshner, who produced songs by Carole King and Phil Spector at the Brill Building, died at 76. [NYT]

Jonathon Rosen

Day 27, 7 a.m.
My editor wakes up and has much to do before the day begins, none of which includes reading the manuscript I sent him almost a month ago. He is very busy! He dresses in his nicest suit and tie; today he has a lunch with a writer who isn’t me, and there is a lot of “interest,” as they say in the business, about his 700-page pile of predictable non-threatening drivel. My editor kisses his wife and son goodbye, feeds the cat, doesn’t read my manuscript, and heads out to work.

Have a good day! his wife calls.

I will! he replies.

Perhaps my manuscript is in his bag, beside his Blackberry and his iPad and his MacBook and his iPhone and his Kindle, or perhaps he forgot it at home since it doesn’t have a touch-screen or titanium cover, or perhaps he cut it up and used it as kitty litter, or perhaps he never brought it home in the first place. He has so very much to do! He needs even more assistants! He hurries to the subway, but stops first at the coffee shop, where he chats with the semi-attractive girl behind the counter and reads the New York Times instead of my manuscript while enjoying a Morning Glory muffin. It’s gluten-free! What a cool place Brooklyn is!

8:30 a.m.
Rush, rush, rush, what a hectic life my editor leads! The train is filled with other busy cool white people from Brooklyn. What skinny pants they all have on! What blasé countenances they all wear! What obscure books they all carry, none of which are mine because my editor is so very busy! He could read some of my manuscript now, of course, but the train ride into Manhattan isn’t very long, and he doesn’t want to take away from important Pretending-To-Check-Email-While-Ogling-Strange-Women time. There’s no cell service in the subway, silly!

Still, the girl in the red hat is pretty cute. Maybe at the next stop he can rub up against her? You’re right, editor—I bet she does want it! Either way, this is no time to be reading some goddamned manuscript. Best to wait until later when you can concentrate. Reading is hard!

9:30 a.m.
At last my editor settles down in his office, puts his feet up on his desk, and doesn’t read my manuscript. What did Arianna Huffington have to say today? Oh boy, I bet it was confrontational and opinionated! Perhaps Arianna has a manuscript my editor could read before mine? Something about blogging or populism or how to fix the whatever it is she thinks is broken? Michael Moore is sure giving the president the business this morning. Is Michael still cool? Is he over? Should my editor buy more graphic novels? What’s up with manga? What does Bookslut think? What does the Times publishing blog say? Phew. What a busy, busy day.

Uh-oh, says his assistant, knocking on his office door—meeting in someone’s office about Something! Will my editor never get a chance to read my manuscript? Is it an emergency meeting, he wonders? Is something going on in the publishing world? Is it over? Is publishing dead? Have they run out of trees? Oh Dear God, is it the iPad? Is it selling? Has it saved us yet? Has it killed us yet? No, no, no; they just need to discuss the final typeface for a book that isn’t mine. Should it be the same typeface as we use for every other goddamned book? Yes? No? Oh, what a day this is turning out to be! Whoops, time for lunch with another author. What a fast-paced business publishing is. If you blink once, you’ll miss one entire blink’s worth of time.

1:00 p.m.
Red?

I could do red.

I’m OK with white.

Red’s good.

Cabernet?

Yeah, let’s do that.

Should we get a bottle?

I don’t know.

How much are you going to drink?

Let’s just get a bottle.

OK.

Cab?

Sure.

What are you getting for an entree?

I was thinking of the veal.

Etcetera.

2:30 p.m.
Wow—by the time he gets back to the office my editor is pretty shit-faced. Still, there is a lot to do beside reading manuscripts; the publishing business has gotten so very complicated these days, what with book videos and, you know, book videos.

Make that scene longer! he says. Make that scene shorter!

He’s a director!

3:30 p.m.
The day is almost over now, so my editor closes his office door, grabs my manuscript, puts his feet up on his desk, and stares out the window.

Maybe I really could be a director? he thinks. What would that be like? I bet it would be great! Or an agent. I could be an agent.

Ninety minutes later his assistant knocks on the door. He is going to be late for his dinner with another author who isn’t me. If he were an agent, he could have dinners all day long!

He stands, sighs, and tosses my manuscript into his drawer.

It’s terrible what’s happened to publishing lately; there’s hardly any time to read at all.

5:30 p.m.
Cocktail?

Sure.

Pardon me, Miss. I’ll have a martini.

I’ll have one, too.

Well, which is it, Mr. Author, are you going to have one or two? Ha ha. Are there any dinner specials?

Etcetera.

• The death-by-tear-gas of a 36-year-old Palestinian protestor has become increasingly hot-button, with the IDF alleging that she almost certainly had a pre-existing condition that helped lead to her death. [NYT]

• In late 2009, according to a new WikiLeaks cable, President Ahmadinejad was willing to play ball on a nuclear fuel swap deal with the West, but top Iranians more hardline than he nixed it. [Arutz Sheva]

• The 112th U.S. Congress begins tonight with four fewer Jews but the highest-ranking Jew—soon-to-be Majority Leader Eric Cantor—in history. [JPost]

• After the recent blizzard, New York City snowplows toppled several tombstones at a gigantic Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn. [City Room]

• Energy companies, mostly Israeli and American, are pissed at the higher tax rates proposed on gas following the gigantic offshore find. [LAT]

It’s an incredible, often uncomfortable read. I’ll leave you with a throw away scene, wherein the author is hunting down a source in a yeshiva dormitory:

On the third floor, we were stopped by a knot of half-dressed bochurim, who spilled out of a room giggling and shrieking. As I got closer, I saw that one of the boys was carrying a shovel with a half-dead ray rat on it, its eyes flickering dully. Rats and mice are a huge problem in [the dorm], and because Lubavitch leadership doesn’t provide extermination services, the residents are forced to do the hunting themselves. Whack! One of the kids had dropped the rat onto the ground and was using the blade of the shovel to cut its neck. A tiny splatter of blood burst forth, and the boys cheered.

Or, in the words of William Golding: “‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’”

A Shtetl Divided: Messianic Vigilants, Brawling Hasidim, and the Battle for Jewish Brooklyn [Harper's]
Related: Tribal Allegiance

A phone message deemed sufficiently mysterious might be passed to SAC’s general counsel, Peter Nussbaum, which is how Nussbaum wound up talking last winter to an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Milton Balkany, who said he had information that was potentially damaging to SAC. The rabbi had, wittingly or not, called on a December day when everyone in Cohen’s orbit was on high alert. The morning’s New York Times featured a story about rumors linking SAC to the government’s investigation of a rival fund, the Galleon Group—which has since blossomed into one of the largest insider-trading probes in Wall Street history. The same afternoon, Cohen’s ex-wife, Patricia, filed a sensational civil suit alleging that he had traded on inside information in the 1980s, while they were still married. (Cohen has moved for dismissal.)

Balkany introduced himself as the dean of a Jewish girls’ school in Brooklyn. He may as well have been calling from another planet—one governed by shtetl values dictating that Jews should accord a high degree of loyalty to each other. The rabbi claimed that, in the course of his work counseling Jewish prisoners, he had learned that the government was pressuring an inmate to give up information about Cohen, and that, as a fellow Jew, he didn’t want to see harm befall the hedge-fund manager, even though they didn’t know each other. It quickly emerged that Balkany wanted something in return—$2 million in cash for his struggling school, Bais Yaakov of Midwood, and a $2 million loan for his former yeshiva, Mesivta Torah Vodaath, one of the oldest and largest of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox high schools. And one more thing: He wanted a 20-minute meeting with Cohen for his son-in-law, an aspiring financier who dreamed of pitching his idol on an investment idea.

The conversation with Nussbaum set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Balkany, a onetime power broker known as “the Brooklyn Bundler,” being found guilty in federal court last month of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements to a government agent. His trial, in a wood-paneled courtroom in lower Manhattan, played out as a kind of Jewish commedia dell’arte. Balkany, the bearded rabbi, was dressed in customary dark suits accessorized with a black velvet yarmulke. He shared the defense table with a Brooklyn boy made good: the lawyer Benjamin Brafman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is famous for representing high-profile celebrities like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Plaxico Burress. The government’s case was argued by Marc Berger and Jesse Furman, both Jewish and Ivy League-educated assistant U.S. attorneys. In the public gallery, Balkany’s wife and a rotating cast of his 13 sons and daughters made up a kind of Greek chorus, sighing and clucking as the damaging testimony added up.

In his various phone calls and meetings with SAC’s lawyers, Balkany had repeated one phrase as if it would insulate him from suspicion: “I’m not a hold-up man.” He would then invariably assert the value of the work his school was doing in the community, or his good character as a Jew. “I’m not here to threaten some—God forbid, I’m on the other side of the fence,” Balkany told Nussbaum in one taped conversation. “You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

Cohen, the Long Island-raised son of a Seventh Avenue garmento, never met Balkany, and he never came anywhere near the courtroom during Balkany’s trial in November. The closest he got, at least publicly, was a modern art auction at Christie’s, 60 blocks uptown. But the rabbi was the least of Cohen’s problems that month: The government’s insider-trading investigation was reaching fever pitch. Two weeks after the trial wrapped up, government agents served SAC and two other hedge funds with subpoenas and began making arrests.

And yet, from the start, Cohen’s lawyers took the rabbi seriously. Within days of Balkany’s first call to Connecticut, SAC’s outside counsel, a former prosecutor named Martin Klotz, reported the rabbi to federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District—the same office pursuing the insider-trading investigation against Galleon. The SAC attorneys agreed to take the step of going undercover, taping hours of conversations that were crucial to the government’s case against Balkany. The rabbi, it seems, provided an excellent opportunity for Cohen’s team to do the government “a solid,” as one lawyer who has represented clients in the insider-trading investigation into Galleon put it to me. Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Philadelphia, explained SAC’s decision to participate as a savvy legal move. “They could say they have a culture of compliance,” he said, “and Exhibit A is this case.”

Now Balkany, who assumed that by presenting himself as a concerned “co-religionist” he could establish a real connection to Cohen, is facing up to 20 years in prison. And it’s all because the rabbi made a simple mistake: believing that, just because he imagined they shared a special bond as Jews, Cohen would feel the same way.

***

On November 1, 2010, the first day of the trial, Brafman, Balkany’s lawyer, urged the jury—three men and nine women, all but two of them black or Latino—not to judge his client as a Jew. “I represent the man with the white beard and black yarmulke,” Brafman said, by way of introduction. “Look at yourselves,” he went on. “Nobody on the jury looks like Rabbi Balkany. That’s not a jury of one’s peers.” It was an effective rhetorical gesture, but it sounded almost absurd in the context of a case that turned on Balkany’s effort to trade on his and Cohen’s shared Jewish heritage. “Frankly, I, I really, I’m doing this as a Jew to a Jew,” Balkany had insisted in a taped conversation with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel. “I’m just stepping in, really, to be of help to him.”

The plan to extort Steve Cohen appears to have originated at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, which the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. “It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,” joked Gary Friedman, the executive director of Jewish Prisoner Services International, an organization that provides services to Jewish inmates. Balkany was a regular visitor to the camp and, in his recorded conversations with SAC’s lawyers, said it was an inmate named David Schick who provided the connection to Hayim Regensberg, the man Balkany claimed was being pressured to give information on SAC. Schick, the scion of a famous bakery dynasty in Brooklyn, is an Orthodox Jew who defrauded his investors of as much as $200 million in the late 1990s.

Regensberg is serving a 100-month sentence for running a Ponzi scheme, and his lawyer, Robert Baum, told me he believes his client has information that may be of interest to the government. Indeed, some of the details that Balkany dangled in his conversations with SAC have proven to connect to real investigations—particularly concerning a healthcare fund called FrontPoint, which is embroiled in its own insider-trading scandal. But prison officials testified during Balkany’s trial that the rabbi never visited Regensberg during the months he spent negotiating with SAC, and federal investigators testified that no one from the government ever spoke to him about the insider-trading investigations, let alone approached him with an offer to cut a deal in exchange for information. “They haven’t tried to follow up,” Baum told me, in late November.

In Jewish terms, Cohen made a strange target. He and his wife, Alexandra—who grew up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family in Washington Heights—do not, according to tax records filed by their family foundation, give to Jewish communal organizations or to synagogues, but choose instead to shower millions on hospitals, urban-youth programs, and the schools where their children are enrolled—including Brown University, from which Cohen’s son, Robert, graduated in 2009. Cohen also sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group devoted to fighting poverty in New York. Of the millions his foundation has given away since it was set up in 2001, the only significant donation to a Jewish cause was $25,000 to a religious-outreach group called Gateways, which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, to buy a table at a gala fundraising dinner in 2004. (The group’s director, Mordechai Suchard, told me he couldn’t remember who was being honored.)

In the wake of Balkany’s arrest, and amid a wave of publicity surrounding Cohen’s ex-wife Patricia, Steve and Alex Cohen earlier this year announced a $50 million gift to an organization that is at least nominally Jewish: the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which will use the money to expand its children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, south of Great Neck, where Cohen grew up. “Stevie Cohen is one of the most charitable people I know, and he’s done extremely well,” said his former boss Howard Silverman, who gave Cohen his start on Wall Street 30 years ago, at the boutique investment firm Gruntal & Co. “He wasn’t into his religion—he was just Jewish, like anyone else.”

Continue reading: a Jewish bond, Republican heavyweights, and “This trial doesn’t need any more drama.” Or view as a single page.

• Whether or not there remain disagreements over this or that issue, the United States and Israeli security establishments remain strongly linked, and the U.S. continues to purchase arms for Israel. [WP]

• The supposed U.S. spy against Iran—maybe?—got a hero’s welcome on his return in Tehran. This case is very strange. [NYT]

• Two synagogues are objecting to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s planned amphitheater for free summer concerts. [NYT]

• Palestinian President Abbas is unlikely to agree to direct talks, as the Israelis want, due to pressure from his party, Fatah. [Haaretz]

• Oh, and great Times op-ed on the conversion bill. [NYT]

All of these elements do appear in Holy Rollers, but their colors are muted and their interactions are half-hearted. Director Kevin Asch chose to go the gentle-coming-of-age story route, focusing on the journey of Jesse Eisenberg’s Sam Gold, a (fictional) 20-year-old straight outta Brooklyn who journeys from restless yeshiva bocher to naïve-but-eager smuggler to minor-league gangsta, until his own soul brings him down (well, and then the cops do). Eisenberg is totally cute in payes, but he basically plays the role as though Sam were any sweet, angsty white kid instead of one from a very specific cultural location.

I’m not objecting to Asch’s decision (which he acknowledged in a Q-and-A after a recent screening of the film in New York) to invent his own hybrid ultra-Orthodox sect, although others have. That seems within the realm of poetic license to me. The problem is that the sect he made up is not particularly convincing. Sam and his friends speak a stereotyped New-York-Jewish-ese with a few extra Yiddish words ostentatiously thrown in, not the complex varieties of Yinglish that are actually spoken in Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves. And interactions in his community, from a meeting with a reproachful rabbi to an awkward parentally-supervised date, similarly feel like they were lifted out of the secular world and airbrushed with Hasid dust.

Things feel a little sharper once Sam enters the underworld: Justin Bartha as Yosef, the neighborhood’s bad apple, and Danny Abeckaser as the operation’s mastermind do a good job at capturing the film’s most interesting insight: That staffing a crime ring with extraordinarily sheltered kids is a brilliant tactic that contains the seeds of its own destruction, because once those kids get good at their jobs, they’ll lose the artless innocence that made them such good patsies to begin with.

“Relax, and act Jewish,” Yosef tells Sam the first time he prepares to get on a plane with thousands of “medicine” pills under his hat. But when is Sam acting Jewish? When he bumbles past airport security in black hat and black coat, as unaware of just what he is carrying as the federal agents were? Or is it later, when he emerges as a brilliant young businessman who knows exactly what he is doing?

Although the differences and grievances, rather than the similarities, between the two groups are hot topics these days, Sudin uses side-by-side pieces to highlight the parallels between the adjacent worlds. “Rocker” and “Hassid Dancing” each show an individual spiritedly engaged with music, while “Gottleib’s Deli” and “Kellog’s Diner” portray the two cornerstone eateries. Sudin’s two favorite works, “2am Hipster Party (Where’s Waldo)” and “2am Hassidic Fabregen” are meant to evoke “the same party, the same enthusiasm,” explained Sudin. She also brings a sense of humor to her work: her “Hipster Bible” bears the word “Irony” in biblical script, and in a depiction of Williamsburg’s controversial bike lane, she makes the composition of Bedford Avenue look like a game of Frogger.

Sudin got the gig by responding to a posting by Aish looking for Jewish art. “It occurred to us that we have all these walls,” explained Adam Jacobs, Managing Director of the Aish Center, who saw an opportunity to meet new groups of people and “let them know about what we do.” Jacobs said the organization is looking for artwork “consistent in our messaging: innovative, true to tradition but artistic and modern.” He aims to start collating Jewish artists on Aish’s website and let them sell their artwork from there. Sudin, originally from the greater Springfield, MA, community, based this series, which has also shown at the Workman’s Circle Building in Murray Hill, on one of her graduating theses from the Pratt Institute. “I see myself as standing in between. I feel connected to both sides, but I’m neither and I can sympathize with both sides,” she said, her hair completely covered in a vibrant yellow scarf, but nose ring showing. “I started college right when hipsterdom started to take off…I lost some friends because of the hipster community.”

Hipsters and Hasids

You should read the whole article, in other words. And, for context, you might want to watch the video, below, that the folks at God & Co. made for Tablet Magazine last year. Certainly provides a new perspective on the Hasid-hipster culture clash, and it’s just really, really funny.

The Golem from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Clash of the Bearded Ones[NYMag]
Feet of Clay [Tablet Magazine
Earlier: Did NYC’s Transit Dept. Strike A Backroom Deal with Satmars?
Better Living Through Cycling

• Savoy, the Manhattan restaurant that trail-blazed the currently haute local-food movement, is leading a trend of seders-in-restaurants with a Sephardic-themed affair next week. [Forward]

• Ooh, and here are several more NYC restaurants with some great seder offerings. [Grub Street]

• Iranian seders sound awesome. [NYT]

• A restaurant called Traif—“Specializing in pork, shellfish, and love”—is opening in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, not far from a huge Hasidic enclave. [Bang it Out]

• Kosher wine that’s actually, y’know, good. [NYT]

• Untouchables-style, Israeli police raided a warehouse containing seven tons of matzoh with fake kosher certificates. [AP/Google]

• Many folks know that The Last Supper was actually a Passover seder. Well, it probably wasn’t. [Biblical Archaeology Review]

• Gatorade has started getting Orthodox Union kosher certification and is actively marketing to the yeshiva set. [The Jewish Star]

God help us when she finds out about Brooklyn.

Vulture Is Undressed by ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’ [Vulture]

Earler: The Scroll on ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’
Fellas: Heed the Millionaire Matchmaker

Started by law-school dropout Noah Bermanoff, Mile End, a small, tightly packed storefront with a few picnic-style tables, a counter, and an open kitchen, aims to bring to New York the experience of eating in that eponymous Montreal neighborhood—long the center of the Canadian city’s Jewish population—and specifically to provide “smoked meat,” which is pastrami-but-not-quite, to the good people living south of the border.

Mile End’s bagels are actually shipped in from Montreal’s St.-Viateur, but everything else is local: like many of the other popular restaurants in the leafy, stroller-heavy Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill, the meat is sustainable and the vegetables house-pickled (it even serves cups of coffee from hip bean purveyor Stumptown). I headed there during prime Sunday brunching hours to see what all the fuss was about. A half-hour wait, an hour meal, and an appallingly full stomach later, I emerged with a much, much better idea.

• The smoked meat hash (below) had charred potatos and onions, with bits of smoked meat strewn about that I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time scraping for, like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box. It came topped with a fried egg, perhaps under the theory that there is nothing that a fried egg won’t make better (a theory for which this dish could serve as useful evidence). Delish.

• The Mont Royal was a large, stuffed latke that—unlike some—didn’t attempt to disguise the potato taste. It was topped with be-chived crème fraiche (more things should use crème fraiche!), perhaps intended to resemble the snow that frequently caps this high hill of Montreal (which abuts Mile End). Plus lox. It was Sunday morning, after all.

• It was the first meal of the day, but how can you not get a smoked meat sandwich! I had remembered smoked meat at Schwartz’s—which practically invented the thing!—as really quite similar to pastrami, maybe only a little thicker. But Mile End’s smoked meat is much more halfway between pastrami, with the tongue-shocking electricity (you’ll find yourself crunching whole peppercorns) and peppery aftertaste, and BBQ brisket, thick and stringy and so rich as almost to be sweet. The sandwich comes on rye and with house-made mustard, very conservatively applied; you can put more on, but you shouldn’t.

• Ah yes, the poutine (top picture). The smoked meat poutine. Poutine is fries, thick gravy, and cheese curds (read Calvin Trillin’s recent New Yorker article for more). All of that, plus smoked meat. This is can’t-miss. Just make sure you exercise a lot afterward—once you can move again.

And, finally, the special Montreal bagels? You think I ate one of those? This is New York!

Mile End

Related: Best of New York [New York]
My Son the Meat Smoker [New York]
Bageled: No Thanks to Montreal Version of New York’s Favorite Hole in One [NY Daily News]

Earlier: Bagel Wars

• The Israeli Embassy in Madrid has of late received letters from Spanish schoolchildren urging the ambassador: “think about not killing the Palestinian children and elderly. I don’t know if it doesn’t bother you, having to murder people. You should leave Palestine.” [Ynet]

• Visiting Washington, D.C., Defense Minister Ehud Barak would not answer questions from a friendly audience on the state of U.S.-Israel relations vis-à-vis Iran. [Laura Rozen]

• Whom does Louis Farrakhan think is partly to blame for the difficulties President Barack Obama has encountered in office? No, you don’t get any hints. [JTA]

• A great piece from Israel on how Russian speakers—who now make up 15 percent of Israelis—have turned entire cities into Moscows-on-Mediterranean. [NYT]

• Meanwhile, in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa (otherwise known as Brighton Beach), there are plans for a reality show that is “a cross between Jersey Shore and Anna Karenina.” The show’s producers will likely find that most residents are—unlike the denizens of the two cited masterpieces—Jewish. [NY Post]

Oh, and regarding my noon post: the two Jews not born in America are Albert Einstein and Isaac Asimov; the convert to Judaism was Sammy Davis, Jr.; and the convert from Judaism was Mel Brooks (who became a Catholic when he married Anne Bancroft).

What the far-left from Britain to Berkeley has been been unable to bring off—a sense among Israel’s allies that Israel has become a heartless, morally heedless aggressor state worthy of sanction and shunning—the far-right in Israel’s own government, and in particular, its Foreign Ministry, seems determined to inculcate to the full. [Haaretz]

• After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to meet with J Street’s congressional delegation, the Israeli government seems increasingly out-of-touch with American Jews, James Besser argues. [JW Political Insider]

• Boxing promoter Bob Arum reached an agreement with the bar mitzvah boy who rented out the Yankee Stadium Jumbotron on the night of June 5th. Meaning: Orthodox fighter Yuri Foreman will very likely take on Miguel Cotto that night in that place. [AP/ESPN]

• Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, and Tzipi Livni have all pledged to attend the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., in late March. [Ben Smith]

• The sustainable food movement collides with old-line Jewish delis. Shall the twain ever meet? [Forward]

• Palestinian rights groups are attempting to organize a boycott of an Israeli ballet company’s performance this Sunday at Brooklyn College. [ArtsBeat]

Last night, though, the warring clans tried to work things out more peaceably, with a debate held at Pete’s Candy Store, a hip Williamsburg music venue. According to a reporter for the blog Free Williamsburg, lead counsel for the Hasids was Isaac Abraham, who ran for city council last fall (he lost, but it was notable that a member of Brooklyn’s large ultra-Orthodox community ran for public office at all). Abraham reportedly lay low on the much-mocked argument that the bikers terrorize the Satmars by showing too much skin; the real problem, he wisely maintained, was that cyclists pose a safety hazard to pedestrians. Cycling advocates retorted that having a dedicated bike lane makes everyone safer. And more or less everyone, Free Williamsburg claimed, blamed the Department of Transportation for failing to listen to their constituents. (The bike advocacy group Transportation Alternatives later disputed that its representative at the debate had derided the DOT.)

So where does this leave the good people of Williamsburg? Perhaps not far from where they started: the attending blogger “left feeling that, though civil, the debate didn’t really get anyone anywhere, other than a few shared laughs and a feeling that neither side is budging more than mere inches.”

On the other hand, a Village Voice writer today declared the entire conflict ridiculous, on the grounds that at least a visible skeleton of the supposedly-removed bike lane is still there on the street. “The last couple of weekends,” he writes, “I pedaled happily on this bike lane with just as much safety as ever, with the Hasids walking along on the sidewalk to my left and some weekend traffic passing by me on my right.”

So at least someone’s happy.

Bicyclists & Hasidic representatives debate the Williamsburg Bike Lane [Free Williamsburg]
Cycling Hipsters are Full of Shit: Bedford Bike Lane Is Still There [Village Voice]

Conservative and Reform temples have been closing or merging across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx for decades now as younger non-Orthodox Jews moved away. There are 35 Conservative and 3 Reform synagogues left in Queens, compared with the 43 Conservative and 8 Reform ones of two decades ago … Only Orthodox houses of worship seem to be on the upswing, with 115 synagogues that have attracted not just the adult children of booming pious communities like that in Kew Gardens Hills, but also new immigrants like those from Uzbekistan.

This tendency does not necessarily indicate a larger one across the country (it’s very unlikely, for example, that any other U.S. city experiences anywhere near the influx of foreign Orthodox Jews that New York does). Still, doesn’t the same pattern feel plausible nationally? Jews on the more intense end of the observance spectrum grow yet more observant, while Jews on the less intense end stop observing altogether?

An Old Synagogue Downsizes in a Desperate Bid to Keep Itself Alive [NYT]

Too Cold To Strip: Bike Protesters Stay Clothed in Hasidic Area of New York [Haaretz]

Earlier: Brooklyn Bike Activists Are Arrested

NYT Goes to Midwood [Ditmas Park Blog]
Where Prosperity Breeds Proximity [NYT]

Anyway, the fight for the streets of Williamsburg continues: in the wee hours of yesterday morning, a small group of black-clad bike activists quietly began to repaint the 14-block stretch of Bedford Avenue bike lane that the DOT had sandblasted. Not quietly enough, though: two of them were apprehended by the Shomrim, the Satmar neighborhood watch group, who called the cops. (No one was arrested.) Before they were caught, the vigilante cyclists filmed themselves repainting the lanes. Anarchy!

Hipsters Repaint Bike Lanes in Brush Off to Hasids [New York Post]

“During his re-election campaign, Mayor Bloomberg struck a deal on several issues of special significance to Hasidic leaders,” the urban planning site Streetsblog said. “Whether the Bedford Avenue bike lane was part of the bargain, we can’t say.” Commenters on that blog and others are convinced that it indeed was the quid to some quo. Occasionally, the discussion has verged on what we hope was joke-anti-Semitism, as when someone wrote on Gothamist, “It appears some people are being Jewed here.”

As we noted back in June, the New York Times reported that Leib Glanz, a notoriously shady Satmar leader, had scored meetings with New York’s deputy mayor about bike lanes. Additionally, Bloomberg campaigned hard in the Satmar community this year. “The bike lane is used very, very often, it’s a very important artery,” Baruch Herzfeld, a quirky Modern Orthodox hipster who acts as unofficial liaison between Williamsburg Satmars and bikers, told Tablet Magazine. “The fact that this bike lane was taken away smells fishy.” The DOT declined to discuss these allegations, offering only a brief statement: the lane, it said, was removed as part of “ongoing bike network adjustments.”

City To Remove 14 Blocks of Bike Lanes on Bedford Ave. [Gothamist]
DOT Sandblasts 14 Blocks of Bike Lane Off Bedford Avenue [Streetsblog]
Brooklyn’s Bicycle Man Uses Two Wheels To Bring Hasids and Hipsters Together [Forward]

Previously: Hasids on Bikes

Later, the reliably outré writer Jonathan Ames empathized with his childhood tormentors—hey, they couldn’t help themselves from hunting down the only Jew in the neighborhood—before bringing up comedian David Cross who proceeded to bend a depantsed Ames over his knee and administer some paddle blows. Cross then took the stage to debunk claims that he is a self-loathing Jew: “I don’t loathe myself, and I don’t loathe Jews. I just find them both equally annoying.” As for the charge that he can be condescending at times, Cross didn’t deny that his biggest targets are religious folks, to whom he says, “You are living a lie that you will never be able to rewind. I’d say that’s pretty condescending.” This judgment includes ultra-Orthodox Jews: “I find them very rude.” Cross read a selection from his new book I Drink for a Reason entitled “Ask a Rabbi”; although his rabbinical accent was commendable, the faux-advice column didn’t quite have us laughing as loud as his finale, in which he and Ames dropped trou and kissed on stage. Two not-so-nice Jewish boys—what could be sexier?

After that, the story changes depending on whom you ask. The editor of Der Blatt, Alexander Deutsch, told Tablet—via our columnist Eddy Portnoy, a professor of Yiddish at Rutgers University—that, after being contacted by Lander’s Satmar-community liaison Rabbi Yitzhok Fleischer, he “received copy for a paid advertisement and put it in just like any other ad.” Fleischer, he said, “bought the advertisement in the name of the Lander campaign,” and thus Der Blatt sent the campaign a bill (which is now floating around the internet).

Lander, however, told Tablet—as he has been telling reporters since the story broke—that Fleischer (who’s listed as a prominent supporter on the campaign’s website) never contacted the campaign about placing such an ad, and, moreover, that Fleischer himself merely provided Der Blatt with pictures of Lander and didn’t dictate the copy. “Everything suggests that [Der Blatt] just wrote it,” Lander said. So, in this version of events, Der Blatt—or someone trying embarrass Lander—made up the ad, then sent the bill to the Lander campaign.

Regardless of what actually happened, Lander, considered the front-runner in the race, has taken a hit from it. The Stonewall Democrats, a political club supporting a (gay) Lander opponent took the opportunity to argue that this is “not the first time Brad Lander has courted homophobes.” Josh Skaller, yet another candidate in the race, told Tablet in a jibe at his opponent, “If you’re not trying to cut corners, you don’t get yourself into trouble.”

‘Abomination’ Ad Strikes at Core of Heyder-Lander Battle for Borough Park [City Hall]
The Toeivah Continues: Brad Lander icht Nisht a Mensch (aka Lander Slanders) [Room Eight]

Kiryat Yam to Be Sued Over Mermaid [Ynet]
Mermaid Fever Sweeps Israel Beach Town of Krivat Yam as Many Report Sightings of Fabled Creature [NYDN]

To reassure critics, they’ve hired Maureen Campbell, the Vassar- and Oxford-educated daughter of Jamaican immigrants, to oversee the inaugural year; Campbell, who grew up in Harlem, isn’t Jewish and doesn’t speak Hebrew herself but said she’s learning fast. (Lucky, since she’ll need it to chat to her students and teachers during breakfast and lunch breaks, when Hebrew will be strictly enforced.) In an interview with The Forward, Campbell was insistent that “you can teach a culture and a language without encouraging the observance of religion.” But, she added, Israeli colors will be integrated into the school’s decor; which means, in other words, it’ll basically be just like a school in Tel Aviv.

Charter School’s New Chief Touts Church-State Separation [The Forward]

Guss’ Pickles Packing Up for Brooklyn [Bowery Boogie]

At the play’s satiric center is Lily, a married 16-year-old yeshiva dropout. A whiny naif bullied by her sister and husband, Lily hires a maid to clean her spotless white house while she eats candy on the sofa. The maid, Blanche, a black lesbian would-be academic who spouts Roland Barthes and brags of affairs with prominent intellectuals. Under her tutelage, Lily begins fitfully to mature—not least by starting to figure out the baffling contradictions of her community. In one of the play’s funniest scenes, she announces at the dinner table her discovery that Syrian Jews hail from, well, the Middle East. Her sister replies, “We’re not Arabs, ass face.”

Adjmi, 36, spoke with Tablet about his own youthful bafflement and what he understands now about where he grew up.

One thing you captured especially well about the Syrian Jewish community was this combination of traditionalism and trashiness.

Yeah. And elegance, too. It’s nouveau riche. It’s totally a common phenomenon.

How do those elements interact within the community? Is there any conflict between them?

I was just incredibly confused growing up. And that was right at the nexus of it…. When my parents got married, they moved to Nashville, and they had three kids. They were, like, southern Jews, very assimilated, they developed their southern accents and stuff. They moved back to Brooklyn when their kids were of marriageable age. And then, I was born—and I was basically, like, the designated Jew. They sent me to the Yeshiva of Flatbush but they weren’t quite religious themselves. At school there were Sephardic Jews and also very religious kids, children of rabbis and stuff like that. And my parents didn’t explain to me what I was doing there. So it felt like a kind of theater to me. And I thought, well, I’ll just mimic what everyone else is doing and figure it out, but I couldn’t figure it out because the values felt so much in contradiction. I thought you were supposed to follow this carapace of coolness: nice clothes, money, and all that stuff, and then pay a kind of … token attention to religiosity. I kept trying to figure out what the logic was to the rules. And I never could figure it out. And then after a while I got very cynical.

Another seeming contradiction that the play highlighted was that Lily and her cohorts barely seem to know they’re Middle Eastern. My understanding was that, within the Syrian community, you were strictly ordered to marry another Syrian Jew.

Lily’s me. I never thought of myself as Middle Eastern, even though I knew I was. I guess it’s really that I never thought of myself as an Other. I was raised to believe that I was in the center and that my identity would be based on exclusion. So I knew I was Syrian but it felt like that was code for “really awesome.” It didn’t mean Middle Eastern, like, from the Middle East. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see someone Middle Eastern, I just saw, white…. No one really discussed where people were from. The other funny thing is, Syrian is kind of like a catchall for Middle Eastern Jews—Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. We’re mutts.

My reading of Blanche was that she represented another layer of satire, a parody of the kind of people who read literary theory. How much were the books she read supposed to be empty signifiers, and how much they were actually representing themselves as texts?

Are you saying, am I parodying intellectualism and intellectuals? Absolutely. I went to Sarah Lawrence and I did study all this stuff. On the one hand I think it was just an imprimateur and this cache that you had, again this exclusionary way of forming an identity. [For Blanche], I think the performance of it is one thing—it’s all about, “I’m going to put on a show, I’m going to perform an identity.” But it’s not just that. That’s not her only discourse. I think she’s trying [with these books] to master the signifiers. All these people are trying to master the codes and the signifiers.

How was race handled in Midwood?

I’m not going to lie to you—there was an enormous amount of racism in my immediate family, and at school. There was one girl who was African American in the yeshiva … she didn’t last very long. If you were Sephardic you thought you were better, you had nicer clothes and pleats in your pants or whatever. If you were Ashkenazic you came from a more solid family, you were going to college, you weren’t hip in that way, maybe, but you didn’t need it, you were more grounded. I started out in the Honors classes and by the time I left I was in the dumb class. It was all Sephardic Jews. It was sort of horrible. And eventually I just left, I dropped out of school my junior year.

Were you out to anyone there?

God, no. It was incredibly homophobic. It’s really hard when there are no models for it. The only gay Sephardic Jew was I guess Isaac Mizrahi, he’s a Syrian Jew who also went to Yeshiva of Flatbush. And he dropped out. But I don’t even know if he was famous yet when I was there. And that was it. I remember when I was in high school I thought, I can just like fix it; I was seeing a therapist who was like, “You can fix yourself.” So I was like, okay, I’ll just do it, I’ll move to Ocean Parkway, I’ll work in an electronics shop, I’ll have kids and somehow just make it work. Until eventually it was like, it’s not going to happen…. I always felt so invisible and just not part of a discourse.

There’s kind of a lack of discourse, or at least a lack of popular representations, of Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants in general.

I didn’t want it to look like a Neil Simon play or a Woody Allen movie. The look of it is much more European. My aunt and uncle were like, “Why don’t you write about me?” And I was like, “God, I’ll never write about you, we’ve seen it.” I want people to be alienated from their experience of Judaism, or of Brooklyn Jews.

Sephardic Jews are trying to fulfill the American Dream—they want to go out and make a lot of money. It’s not an anomaly. It’s not so weird, ultimately. There’s something very innocent and transparent about it. You look at the houses in Midwood—now they all have to be Spanish-style villas. I think there’s something beautiful about it, and something tender. You can point to the Syrian community and say, “Uch, they’re all kind of vulgar and crude.” Well, we’re all kind of vulgar and crude, sometimes.

Brooklyn, New York, is a central location on the map of Jewish American migration. At its height, in the 1950s, the borough’s Jewish population numbered more than a million. Today, many thousands still make their home there, as evidenced by the vast number of synagogues thriving in neighborhoods as diverse as Park Slope (mostly reform and conservative) and Borough Park (mostly Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox). But Jews have long since abandoned other neighborhoods, leaving their synagogues to fend for themselves. Some have been converted into churches or commercial spaces, others simply leveled.

Photographer Thomas Roma has spent years photographing Brooklyn’s houses of worship—of every denomination. But he found himself particularly drawn to synagogues for the stories the buildings seemed to tell about their neighborhood’s and congregation’s past, present, and future. He’s now collected his beautiful, large-scale, black-and-white photographs of these places in a book titled On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship, and the Practice of Loving Kindness.

We visited with Roma to find out what draws him to these houses of worship—even those that, today, are nothing more than vacant lots.

Photos copyright © 2007 Thomas Roma. All rights reserved

For most of my life, I was a consumer of bottled seltzer from the supermarket. Store-bought seltzer was what my parents served me when I was growing up, the child of two unaffiliated Jews in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s; it was what I came to like. It was also, importantly, what my father used to make an egg cream, the iconic Brooklyn drink: a little chocolate syrup (traditionally Fox’s U-bet, which is made here in Brooklyn, though my father used Bosco, New Jersey’s version of Fox’s U-bet), a splash of milk, the rest of the glass full of plain seltzer. The milk and soda give an egg cream the froth of a root-beer float, but it isn’t so sickeningly sweet; in fact, the seltzer gives it a slightly metallic tang. People are adamant in their opinions about how to make one. My father says the ideal method is to mix a little milk and a dollop of chocolate syrup in the bottom of a glass, then spritz seltzer from a siphon, using high pressure to raise a good head, then ease up on the pressure to fill the glass. This, of course, presumes you have a siphon. We never did, and the egg creams came out fine, but my father assured me the siphon would have made them bubblier. Fox’s U-bet’s website tells you to put the milk and syrup in the glass, spritz the seltzer onto a spoon in the tilted glass (which also makes a good head), and stir it after. Either way, and probably any other way you make it, it’s delicious.

When I was little, egg creams at home were a treat, but they were also a way to tide me over till I could get the perfect egg cream out in the world. (Another such item was a sandwich made with an English muffin, an egg, American cheese, and Taylor ham, much like an Egg McMuffin, but perhaps marginally healthier because my mother had prepared it. This was treyf twice over—pork, and meat with cheese—but my parents weren’t observant. They sent me to Hebrew school for three weeks in 1976, and when I complained that it was boring, they never made me go back.) I adored my father’s egg creams, but I lived for the ones you could get from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, from silver carts like those that sell hot dogs, undercooked and oversalted pretzels, and, if you’re lucky, roasted chestnuts in wintertime. An egg cream and a pretzel rod—the perfect combination, smooth and sweet with salty and crunchy—cost a dime or a quarter in 1980, the kind of money a kid would have in her pocket back in those days when kids sometimes got mugged in broad daylight. And the egg cream you’d get from a vendor was very, very good. It would come in a blue and white waxed paper cup, sort of like a gigantic Dixie cup, whose taste complemented the drink in the same way green glass bottles used to make Coke taste better. As my father had promised, they were frothier than the ones at home, because the vendors made them with a siphon. The bubbles were fresher and springier. I don’t know if there’s any scientific basis for this observation, but ask anyone who’s tried egg creams made both ways; she’ll concur.

Although I knew that siphon seltzer was better, it never occurred to me that I could procure it, so I became an avid drinker of the supermarket kind. Sitting with an open bottle—or sometimes two, sequentially—on my desk enlivened the workday, which gives you some idea of how uneventful a writer’s day can be. But it got to the point where my husband and I were going through three or four bottles a day—that’s a minimum of twenty-one liters a week to schlep home from the supermarket and up the four flights of stairs to our apartment. And we also had to dispose of the empty bottles, either by recycling them or by wrangling them down to the grocery store to collect the deposit, something few people do in this city. It began to seem not only a hassle but embarrassingly quixotic.

But after a time I realized that New York City is one of the last places where you can still get seltzer delivered in those old-fashioned glass siphon bottles, which are beautiful, convenient, and more ecologically sound than plastic because they’re washed and refilled again and again. I never saw them in use in my own childhood, but I remember (or imagine remembering) them vividly because I inherited the memory from my father and from others of his generation. At some point in the 1970s, when my father worked in Midtown, he saw a seltzer delivery truck on the street and bargained with the driver to sell him one of the empty siphons, which he eventually got for ten dollars—enough money, at the time, for two full tanks of gas. He still has it in his kitchen. Ask people of his generation who grew up in the New York area about seltzer in their childhoods, and they will wax poetic about the delivery truck, the wooden crates—“the sides were no more than four inches high,” my father says, as if amazed that something so small could hold something so beautiful—the glass bottles, which were clear, blue, or green, and the shiny metal siphon heads. My Aunt Edie remembers her grandmother getting seltzer delivered; my father and my Aunt Linda remember the seltzer in blue bottles coming to their own home. (They spent a lot of time with their grandparents, so any of them may have had a blurry understanding of whose house was whose.) If my grandparents—one from Flatbush, one from the Bronx, one from New Jersey, and one from Yorkville, when it was still home to Russian immigrants—were alive, I bet they could tell stories about their own parents getting soda delivery. My Uncle John recalls that in the 1940s and ’50s his family’s seltzer was delivered by the Blume Seltzer Company here in Brooklyn; their neighbors in Borough Park owned the company. When his parents were out, he and his siblings waged epic battles, spraying each other with the siphons. This was, of course, also a time when all kinds of things got delivered: milk, ice for the icebox, eggs, though my father went down to the local chicken farm with their empty cardboard box and brought the week’s eggs home himself. Sometimes he’d also have to buy a chicken, which a worker would kill and pluck for him on the spot; it would still be warm while he carried it home. The Fuller Brush man came to your door, as did the Avon lady, the salesman who offered encyclopedias, and a Bible salesman, with any luck less creepy than Flannery O’Connor’s Manley Pointer.

Though such salespeople are mostly gone, big cities are the last refuge of their more antiquated trades. Once, in my twenties, I rode the train to New Haven with my manual typewriter, because the best typewriter repairman on the East Coast was there. Last year I learned how to set moveable type and run a letterpress at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan, a miraculous loft in which they teach all the lost arts of bookmaking—flatbed cylinder and platen press, paper making, bookbinding; the hulking nineteenth-century machine for cutting paper is called, charmingly, a guillotine. My neighborhood, like much of brownstone Brooklyn, still has a guy who drives around in an old green truck, ringing what sounds like a bicycle bell to call people from their homes to have their knives sharpened. He usually arrives on a Saturday, and six or seven of the women on the block will line up with eight-inch kitchen blades, meat cleavers, and paring knives in their hands, as if it were normal to stand around chatting with neighbors while holding dangerous implements. He has sharpened my grandmother’s desk scissors for me as well as my ice skates. You can still have your laundry washed by hand in Brooklyn, if you’re willing to pay for it; and our local cobbler, a Russian immigrant whose gruff exterior belies a sweet personality, can make an exact duplicate of your shoes, if you want him to. So it’s no surprise that, given this city’s legendary tolerance for the mildly odd and nostalgia for its own past, you can still get seltzer delivery here.

**pagebreak next=”That first delivery, all the bottles were clear, inscribed with the names of the various local factories where they’d been made.”**To try to arrange it, I left a message for Walter Backerman, who I knew delivered in Manhattan and the Bronx, asking if he came out here. It was Friday afternoon when I called, and I assumed Backerman was a Jewish name, so I also wished him Shabbat shalom, a good Sabbath. My phone call was returned an hour later, not by Walter but by his colleague, Eli Miller, who’s been delivering seltzer in Brooklyn for forty-seven years. He arranged to bring by a case the next afternoon, and asked why I’d wished Walter Shabbat shalom when my name wasn’t Jewish. (When you’re Jewish but not a Stein or a Rabinowitz, you keep answers to that on hand, along the lines of “It is a Jewish name, just not one you’re familiar with.” In my case, I can also remind people that those sticky Almond Kisses that pass for candy at Pesach are made by Barton’s Chocolates.)

The next afternoon, Eli drove up—not in the seltzer truck I’d been imagining, the open vehicle with bottles clanking that my father had bequeathed me from his memories, but in an old gray station wagon. He brought the seltzer up the front steps in the four-inch-high crate my father had recalled so fondly; that first delivery, all the bottles were clear, inscribed with the names of the various local factories where they’d been made back when my father was a child. (Our most recent delivery was two cases of cobalt blue bottles, except for one that was dark green and another a pale, soft green, like sea glass. That one, Eli told me, was a safety bottle, completely encased in rubber so I could drop it and it wouldn’t break. I didn’t try it to see.) Eli is in his seventies, but he’s tall and strong, with a friendly smile and the kind of outgoing personality you’d predict for a deliveryman. His accent is pleasantly rough and guttural, part Brooklyn—he was born on Twenty-seventh Street in Coney Island, and grew up in Borough Park—and part Yiddish. (Recently he said to me, “I’m going to see my sister this weekend; she’s coming to stay by my brother,” a locution my grandparents used, but which now only seems to exist in the camped-up Yiddish world of movies like The Hebrew Hammer.) That first time he came, he brought a folder of articles that had been written about him for me to look through, and told me about a children’s book, The Seltzer Man, that local writer, artist, and teacher Ken Rush had published about him in the 1990s. I ordered the book as soon as I finished hauling the seltzer upstairs—it was only ten bottles, but you have to be a big guy like Eli to carry them all at once. The book’s lovely, sun-drenched illustrations in oil are a rhapsody on the vanishing world of seltzer delivery.

Eli grew up in a Conservative Jewish family. His father, Meyer, went to synagogue for all the holidays, and Eli’s grandfather owned a butcher shop, so they had a ready supply of kosher meat. Meyer was a housepainter and his wife, May, worked at Ratchik Bakery on Avenue J, but like many families of their generation, they stressed the importance of education, and their children are all highly literate. Eli’s older brother became a teacher and an engineer; his younger brother is a computer graphic engineer for Dow Chemical; his sister is a professor at the University of Haifa and has twice been a Fulbright scholar. Eli himself wanted to be a schoolteacher, but when in 1952 he approached his favorite high school teacher, Mr. Hellerbogen, and asked if he should enter the profession, Mr. Hellerbogen said, “Eli, teachers don’t make any money at all. You’d be better off driving a truck.”

When Eli got out of the service, he went to work on Wall Street. He worked his way up from dividend clerk to cashier, and found himself making $125 a week by 1960—a living wage, but no better than he might have made as a teacher. When he told this to his friend Seymour Kooperman, who drove a soda route, Seymour bragged that he made $300 a week. Eli challenged him to show him how, and Seymour drove him around to prove it. “He was right!” Eli recalls. “There was money in this business.”

Not long after, he was sitting around in his cousin Lowell Wexler’s collision shop on the corner of Ralph and Remsen near Eastern Parkway, wondering what he should do about his future. “You see that soda shop?” Lowell said, pointing to the place across the street. “All the black guys in the neighborhood go in and buy a beer called Copenhagen Castle. You like to sell; you should go get a truck and sell that beer.”

The shop was owned by two brothers, Harry and Jerry Hittelman. Eli went over and asked about buying maybe ten cases to start a business in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which none of the beverage delivery men served. Harry told him he was crazy to think about going into Bed-Stuy to sell; there weren’t any soda men there for a reason. “Whatever you do,” Eli remembers him saying, “sell for cash. Don’t give credit.” Eli bought thirty cases for a total of sixty dollars, which he didn’t have on him, but his Uncle Irving across the street vouched for him. Then he needed a truck. He found a used van, a black 1949 Chevy, “the old-fashioned kind, with the two doors that opened in back,” for $190. Eli’s savings, after buying the beer, amounted to $150, so he went to his mother and asked to borrow forty dollars. “I don’t have it,” she said, “but if you need it to go into business, you could take my silver dollars.” Eli didn’t want to take them—many were from the 1870s, and he knew they were valuable—but he didn’t have any other way to get the money, so he accepted. (“And I still feel bad about it,” he says. “I paid her back tenfold, but those silver dollars had been special to her.”) He paid for the used truck with $150 in cash and the forty silver dollars, went out with his thirty cases to Bed-Stuy, and sold all of them, half on credit.

When he went back to Harry Hittelman to report his success and buy more, Hittelman said, “You gave those blacks credit on fifteen cases? You’ll never see that money.” Eli disagreed. “They were honest people,” he told him. “They’ll be very appreciative that I came around to the neighborhood and trusted them. You’ll see.” To me he adds, “And wouldn’t you know, when I went back the next week, I got every penny.”

Eli built up a good route in Bed-Stuy, first with the Copenhagen Castle, which he describes as “similar to a Miller, but less expensive,” and later with soda water and the flavored syrups to make Italian sodas. By 1963 he had to sell the van and buy a big clanking seltzer truck like the one my father remembers. But soon after John F. Kennedy was shot, some black kids broke into his truck. When he asked them why, they told him, “We don’t want whiteys in our neighborhood,” and that they thought the assassination was a white conspiracy. This was an isolated incident; “My customers were good people,” he says. “People weren’t like that.” But soon after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a group of young men broke into his truck when it was parked at the corner of Park Place and Bedford, and these kids wanted to fight with him. Eli ran to a nearby drugstore, told the druggist what was going on, and the man came out to the street to defend him. “The drugstore man had been in the neighborhood a long time, and he knew the kids. When he told them he’d turn them in, they ran away.” The truck was mostly empty, but Eli felt lucky that no one had been injured. After this, he decided he had to stop working in the neighborhood. When he went around to tell his old customers that he wouldn’t be coming anymore, he felt awful. Some offered to come meet him at the curb, so he wouldn’t have to come up to their apartments and leave his truck unattended, but it made more sense to move into more middle-class neighborhoods like Bensonhurt and Bay Ridge. Later he also started coming up to Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill. Over time, even as business has dwindled, he’s also had many customers in Brighton Beach, where there are lots of Russians and older Jews—people who consider seltzer important. He gets his bottles sterilized and refilled by Kenny Gomberg at G & K Beverages in Canarsie, the last seltzer bottler in New York City.

Eli’s seltzer is more expensive than the kind we got in the store, so we don’t drink it with the same abandon, and the taste is different: saltier, more metallic, sharper. Learning to control the pressure was trickier than we’d expected; we had a few days of wet countertop before we mastered it. Even with soy milk, it makes phenomenal egg creams. But more important, we like having the crates and bottles in our kitchen, a tie to this city’s past. I like the connection to my father’s childhood, my aunts’ and uncle’s childhoods, and a world that was based around neighborhoods, where you knew the people who lived next door and ran the shop around the corner. I don’t kid myself that Eli is my friend, but I really like him. Not since I was a child and my parents took me to Al at National Shoe Rebuilders so they could have my shoes resoled and I could pet Al’s dogs, Lucky and Jenny, and his cat, Snowy, have I so been able to look forward to seeing someone I know so little; and it’s a welcome relief in this world in which we do much of our shopping on the Internet, much of our communicating with family and friends on e-mail, to sit on the stoop with Eli and talk politics. He’s a lifelong Democrat—a huge supporter of Barack Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination, “though I’m not sure the country is ready for him yet”—and sharp in his critique of the Bush administration. “Eighty percent of Americans want us to get the troops home from Iraq,” he says, “and he won’t do it. Which makes him a murderer—boys are coming home missing arms, missing legs; more are going to die just because he’s pigheaded, not to mention all the Iraqis who are getting killed. And for a trillion dollars! He could have given health care to every man, woman, and child in America for that. He could have given housing to four hundred thousand low-income families. And instead he’s going to go down as the most reviled president in our history.”

Eli’s work life hasn’t always been happy; the robberies were small incidents, but one terrible day, his father, who used to help him with deliveries, died on the route. “He’d gone up to visit his favorite customer, an old Argentine lady on Avenue Y and Ocean Parkway. He was up there five o’clock, five fifteen; at five thirty I started to get worried. The super of the building came running out to tell me my father had collapsed on the stairs on the second floor. I tried to revive him, but he was gone. That was the saddest day of my life. Or the second saddest, second after the day my mother died. I was very close to my mother.” Despite this, and despite that his job is physically demanding, he takes an overwhelmingly positive view of his work. “This is a hard life,” he says, “not an easy vocation. But what has made it wonderful is the people. I deliver seltzer to some of the most beautiful people. And despite the hard work, when you do this, you have independence, no fear of being laid off, and the door is open to work as hard as you want and make as much money as you want. I know it’s a little bit of an anachronism, though.”

In Ben Katchor’s graphic novel The Jew of New York, an 1830s seltzer aficionado named Francis Oriole concocts a business plan of tremendous, kooky grandeur: he dreams of carbonating Lake Erie and piping fresh soda water to New York City. Seltzer must have seemed like a miraculous remedy in 1830, and still a relatively novel one—Joseph Priestly, who is credited with stumbling on the happy accident of carbonated water, made his findings known in the 1770s. In Oriole’s plan, seltzer would run—or spritz, I suppose—from every tap, and no one would suffer from indigestion. (Many of the book’s characters appreciate a good burp, which Katchor refers to by its wonderfully onomatopoeic Yiddish name: greptz.) I’m not certain Oriole is Jewish, but he does repeatedly wipe his nose on a “handkerchief embroidered with kabbalistic symbols”; and most of his patrons seem to be Jews, who have long had an affinity for seltzer, I’m guessing because of what many of us traditionally eat. Is there a diet more fat-laden and full of white flour than that of the descendants of shtetl Jews? Though living in New Jersey and not in Minsk, my grandmother fed her three children old-country foods like gedempft meat (brisket) and potatoes, latkes, matzoh brei, kuegel, kasha varnishkas, challah with schmaltz, and, my father’s favorite, gribbinis, the burnt fried skin left over after rendering chicken fat. She also kept a vat of oil in the oven and would take it out to deep-fry potatoes for an evening snack. Her house was full of candy—M&M’s, Kraft caramels, one-pound Hershey’s bars, and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. I love seltzer, but if I ate like that every day, I’d probably need it to settle my stomach, too.

Eli thinks about seltzer more ecumenically. “The Italians like to mix it with wine or with juices. But people of all faiths and religions like seltzer. At this point, most of my customers are gentiles.”

I am generally suspicious of the desire to romanticize one’s own childhood—after all, we had few responsibilities then: it was easy to feel the world was benign—as well as of the Luddite tendency to prefer antiquated technologies to those we have today. I still think my manual typewriter is an elegant machine, but it’s no match for the ease of the computer on which I’m typing now; and to say that the world was better off without cell phones would be partly true and partly to forget how frustrating it was not to be able to reach someone when you were lost or running late.

When Eli Miller retires, which he hopes to do not long from now, I doubt anyone will take over his route. He’s one of only five soda men left in New York City. I’ll be surprised if the business exists anywhere in twenty years, when everyone who still remembers it from the 1940s is too old to heft the crates of bottles into their apartments. The siphons will be something I tell my children about, something from another time, the way I know about iceboxes; the Dictaphone; my grandfather’s first apartment, here in Brooklyn Heights; and my Uncle David’s dental office in Woodside, Queens, so close to the El tracks that his hearing suffered, later in life. I am glad to have experienced this piece of Brooklyn and New York history before it vanishes. Eli is right that his profession is becoming an anachronism; this only makes his seltzer deliveries seem more like a gift.

This essay is excerpted from the anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, edited by Valerie Steiker and Chris Knutsen.

Illustration by Vanessa Davis.